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12mo, Paper, 90 cts. Cloth, $1.25. 



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III. 

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6,ty3 




How to Educate Yourself: 



WITH OR WITHOUT MASTERS. 



GEO. CAEYEGGLE8TOI, 



v ; 




NEW YORK: 

G. P. PUTNAM & SONS, 

4th AVENUE AND 23d STKEET. 

1872. 






Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1872, by 

G-.P. PUTNAM & SONS, 
In the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, 



V) 



PREFACE. 



In preparing this little book, I have done the work 
conscientiously, whether it shall prove to be well or ill 
done. 

In every matter treated, I have given the advice I 
should give to a son or a brother — drawing my mate- 
rials from every available source. 

The narrow limits of the volume have compelled me 
to speak ex cathedra in many cases when I should have 
preferred to reverently cite authority, or to carefully 
state to the reader the premises from which my con- 
clusions were drawn. 

If I have spoken dogmatically, however, I would have 
the student remember that the whole spirit of my 
teaching is that he should never accept blindly the 
authority of any man or of any book, and to this rule 
my own little volume certainly does not claim to be an 
exception. 

Beooklyn, September, 1872. G. 0. E. 



0NTEN1 S. 



INTRODUCTION. 

PAGE 

The Nature and Purpose of the Book 1 

CHAPTER L 

HOW TO MAKE OUT A COUESE OF STUDY. 

What to study — A Common Error . . 6 

What then, should be the Student's Course ?........ 8 

What are the Purposes of Education ? 8 

The Comparative Values of Various Studies. . „ 10 

Herbert Spencer's Classification. 10 

The Factors involved .................. 11 



CHAPTER II. 

COMMON SCHOOL STUDIES. 

The Waste of Time 15 

Of Geography ................. 15 

How to study Geography 16 

Arithmetic 17 

The Study of English 23 

The Failure of the Grammars 24 



VI CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

How to study Grammar 26 

Pronunciation . 27 

Spelling. 27 

Learning the Meanings of Words 30 

The Structure of Sentences 32 

Higher English 34 



CHAPTER HI. 

COLLEGIATE STUDIES. 

What to study 42 

The Scientists and the Classicists 44 

The Question to be decided 47 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE STUDY OE LANGUAGES. 

The Comparative Values of Languages 49 

The Comparative Difficulty of learning them 50 

How to study Languages 51 

The Group System 52 

M. Marcel's System 53 

How to learn to read a Language 54 

The Time necessary 63 

Learning to understand the spoken Tongue 64 

Learning to speak the Language 70 

The Eobertsonian System 72 

CHAPTER V. 

THE HIGHEB MATHEMATICS. 

The Nature and Value of Mathematical Study 75 

The Processes 77 

The Order of Studies 77 

The Way to study Algebra ...... 79 

A Way out of Difficulties 80 

Another Way out of Difficulties 81 



CONTENTS. Vll 

PAGE 

Rules 82 

The other Mathematics ...... ... 83 

CHAPTER VI. 

PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 

What Physics to study '. 88 

The Object sought 89 

How to study Physics ...... . . ......... 89 



CHAPTER VH. 

MOKAL AND INTELLECTUAL SCIENCE. 

The Value of this kind of Study 93 

The Cause of the Mistake ................................ 93 

The Value of these Studies as a Means of Culture ......... 94 

Their Value as a Preparation for other Study ... ....... 95 

The Practical Wisdom of their Teachings ....... 96 

The Order and Methods of Study. ........................ 99 

CHAPTER VIH. 

GENERAL BEADING. 

Some Words of warning 104 

An Exception 107 

What to read. ........ 107 

Courses of Reading .................................. *110 

Some Good Rules .......................... 112 

Reading up 113 

Reading to cure Defects 114 

Reading to strengthen Strong Points 114 

Reading both Sides ...................................... 115 

How Much of a Book to read. .......... 115 

Reading about Books ..... 117 

Dangerous Reading ............... 118 

A Schedule of Reading-matter 121 

Novel-reading 122 

The Reading of History 123 



viii CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Poetry • • • 126 

Biography, etc 127 

Dictionaries as Reading-matter 129 

CHAPTER IX. 

HOW TO STUDY AND HEAD TO THE BEST ADVANTAGE. 

A Practical Education 132 

Economy of Time . . 133 

"What to do with the Memory 134 

How to cultivate the Memory 136 

Things that impair the Memory 136 

Memorandum Books, etc. I 139 

Mechanical Mem:ry ......................... Ill 

When to read • 112 

How -much to read 112 

The proper Time of Day for reading and study 113 

Thought-study 1H 

The Apportionment of Time 118 

How Many Studies should be carried on at once. . ....... . 150 



ERRATUM. 



On p. 53, M. Marcel's work is said to be out of print. This, it 
appears, is not now the case, as the book is included in Messrs. 
D. Appleton & Co.'s Catalogue. 



HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

INTRODUCTION. 

THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF THE ROOK. 

Lest the purpose and meaning of this manual 
shall be misunderstood, let me say at the outset that 
I have no patent system of easy education to present. 
I can point out no " royal road to learning," for the 
reason that there is none, and in the very nature of 
things there never can be one. 

And yet the sole purpose of this volume is to make 
the road to learning and culture somewhat easier than 
it is, particularly in the case of students who have no 
master. 

Every educated man is, in some sense, self-educated. 
No teacher, whatever his abilities may be, can force an 
education upon an unwilling pupil. Furthermore, no 
teacher can educate a persistently idle pupil. He can 
bridge over difficulties ; he can point out the way ; he 
can advise and direct ; he can stimulate the student to 
activity ; but the real work must be done by the stu- 
dent himself, if it be done at all. 

There is no denying the fact that regular teachers 
and regular schools are necessary to some students and 



2 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

very valuable to all, and I have no sympathy whatever 
with the prevalent cant which teaches that the men 
commonly called " self-made " are greater, or better, or 
wiser than those whose acquirements and culture have 
been obtained through more regular channels. Dr. 
Franklin was a wise man and an able one, and Mr. 
Greeley has achieved a grand success in his profession. 
Elihu Burritt learned a good deal about languages 
while yet at the forge, and Robert Collyer has not for- 
gotten how to make a horse-shoe while he has been 
learning how to preach an eloquent sermon. But all 
these men, and others like them, would have been' even 
more successful, or at any rate their success would 
have come to them earlier in life, if they had had the 
advantages of a regular training. The mistake com- 
monly made is that of attributing their greatness to 
their want of schooling, when in point of fact they are 
great in spite of that want, because they have by untir- 
ing industry supplied the defect, doing without teachers 
that which they could have done much more easily and 
much more perfectly with them. Hugh Miller wrought 
out his knowledge of geology from the rocks in which 
he worked as a craftsman ; but it does not follow that 
the best road to geological lore lies through the busi- 
ness of a quarry man or a stonecutter. 

Let no student delude himself with the idea that he 
is above the need of instructors. If he can attend 
good schools he should do so by all means, and his 
education so acquired will be much more satisfactory, 
much more perfectly rounded than it ever could be 
otherwise. 

But if attendance upon school instruction be impos- 
sible, or if the student be cut short in it, there is no oc- 



THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF THE BOOK. 3 

casion for him to despair, or to abandon the work of 
educating himself. If he is to be educated at all, he 
must educate himself in any case, and while the task 
would be much easier in school than out, it is not im- 
possible of accomplishment wholly without teachers. 

The chief service which a teacher is called upon to 
render an earnest student, is that of guiding and di- 
recting his studies ; advising him what branches to 
pursue, and how to follow them with the best results. 
And herein lies the chief advantage which the earnest 
student in school has over the earnest student out of 
school. The one has his course ■ marked out for him, 
and is instructed carefully in the readiest and surest 
means of mastering it. The other must mark out his 
own course, with such advice as he can get, and must 
pursue it after methods of his own devising, for the 
most part. Again, the one has, presumably, more time 
at his disposal, and better facilities every way, than the 
other, and therefore has less need to know how to 
economize his time closely in the selection and pursuit 
of his studies. 

It is to cure precisely these defects that this book is, 
in the main, designed. My purpose is to supply, as far 
as possible, the place of a teacher to teacherless stu- 
dents, guiding them to a proper selection of subjects 
for study, and suggesting the best methods of pursuing 
each. 

To this end I shall make free use of other people's 
experience, as well as my own, giving that which seems 
to me best, in every case, whether the idea be new or 
old, my own or some other person's. The plan of the 
book is a simple one. Each class of study will be ex- 
amined as to its nature, its value, the peculiar advan- 



4 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

tages arising from the information contained in it, and 
from the culture it brings. Its difficulty, and all other 
circumstances bearing upon the student's selection, will 
be placed fairly before him, so that he may choose ad- 
visedly the branches to which he will give his atten- 
tion. 

After this, in each case, the best methods of pursu- 
ing the study will be given, together with such other 
hints, suggestions and warnings as every earnest and 
competent teacher finds frequent occasion to give. 

In regard to reading and study outside of text-books, 
a similar plan will be pursued. I shall endeavor to 
guide the student in the selection of his literature by 
pointing out the nature and value of different classes 
of books, the kind of culture and the kind of informa- 
tion each gives, and to prepare him, as far as practica- 
ble, to make a judicious selection and arrangement of 
his reading matter for himself. 

The book, as will be seen at a glance, is intended 
principally for students who must educate themselves 
outside of schools and colleges ; but I am persuaded 
that even students whose advantages are of the best, 
will find many things to help them in these pages, and 
I write with the hope that my. little book will supply 
to this class of students a kind of guidance of which I 
myself often felt the need both in school and at college. 

A work of this kind must, in the nature of things, 
be very imperfect, because of the narrowness of its 
limits, if for no other reason ; but having had frequent 
occasion to counsel and aid persons engaged in the 
work of self-education, I come to the task now, know- 
ing pretty well the nature of the difficulties which be- 



THE NATUBE AND PUKPOSE OF THE BOOK. 5 

set this class of students. If the pages which follow 
shall be found to supply to them at all adequately the 
guidance and counsel they need, I shall be abundantly 
satisfied. 



CHAPTEE I. 

HOW TO MARK OUT A COURSE OF STUDY. 

WHAT TO STUDY. 

The first point to be decided in beginning every edu- 
cation is what to study. The student who can go to 
school and to college has the question answered for 
him, though not always wisely ; but he who must de- 
cide it for himself, is usually puzzled by the multiplicity 
of possible studies, and by his ignorance both of their 
character and of his own wants. And yet it is of the 
utmost importance that he should decide this question 
correctly. An error here is always serious, and some- 
times the failure to master a badly-chosen subject leads 
to the abandonment of all effort in despair. 

A COMMON EEE0E. 

It is a common error of people studying without a 
teacher to suppose that they must follow the course of 
the schools, taking not only every subject, but every 
text-book, in the order of school arrangement. To see 
the folly of this it is only necessary to remember that 
the student without a master has less time than the 
schoolboy to give to study, (else he might himself go 



HOW TO MARK OUT A COURSE OF STUDY. 7 

to school,) and that his progress will naturally be some- 
what slower than that of the pupils for whom the 
school course is intended, aided as they are by system- 
atic instruction. Besides all this, there is a great deal 
of time consumed in the schools over exercises that are 
certainly not necessary or even useful to an earnest stu- 
dent, so resolved upon securing an education as to un- 
dertake it without the ordinary helps. This is due 
partly perhaps to the fact that there are idle pupils in 
every school whose first need is to be made active in 
study, even if it be done by otherwise useless exer- 
cises ; but much more largely, doubtless, to the want of 
judicious condensation in the text-books. The best- 
cultivated men in America, for instance, unless their 
avocations lead them to make geographical study a spe- 
cialty, do not remember enough of their bulky, grad- 
ed school text-books on the subject, to fill more than a 
score of these pages. They remember all that is worth 
remembering. They know all the leading facts, per- 
haps, but these might have been written in the smallest 
of school-books and learned in a few weeks, while every 
schoolboy plods for years through volume after volume 
full of petty geographical details of no consequence in 
themselves, never remembered, and certainly not worth 
the learning to a young man who has his education to 
get without assistance from others. And the same 
thing is true in a greater or less degree of almost every 
other branch of school study. The school course is in- 
tended for pupils who have time and opportunity to 
master it. It has much that is almost wholly useless in 
it, and it is certainly not suited, as a whole, to students 
who must be their own teachers. 



HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 



WHAT THEN, SHOULD BE THE STUDENT'S COUESE ? 

Certainly not the same in every case ; hardly the 
same in any two cases. The question is one that must 
be decided with reference to the age, capacity and cir- 
cumstances of each individual. The one who has 
hardly any leisure cannot master many things, and his 
slender list of studies should embrace only the ones 
most desirable for him to follow, while his fellow, whose 
leisure is more abundant, should make use of it in pur- 
suing a wider course. It is very true that in all know- 
ledge there is profit, but all knowledge is not equally 
profitable, and the man whose education must be a par- 
tial one at best, should aim to make it embrace such 
parts of the whole as will best serve the purposes of 
education in his particular case. And to enable us to 
ascertain what will do this, it is necessary that we shall 
inquire at the outset — 

WHAT AKE THE PUKPOSES OE EDUCATION? 

Different people have different ideas of life, and ac- 
cordingly they pursue their studies with all kinds of ends 
in view. Men sometimes work pretty diligently over 
their books, with no higher motive than a desire to 
make a creditable appearance in society. Young peo- 
ple often have an ambition to appear learned with no 
great desire to be so, and so seek just enough of erudi- 
tion to enable them to talk of things they know very 
little about, as if they understood them. 

But education has two definite purposes to serve, 
and one or both of these should be in the mind of the 
student from first to last. The object most commonly 



HOW TO MARK OUT A COURSE OF STUDY. 9 

sought by the student is practical utility. He studies 
because learning and the intellectual culture it brings 
with it are things that have a market value ; because an 
educated man can make money more readily and more 
surely than an uneducated one can ; because his educa- 
tion will open up to him more agreeable business pur- 
suits than an untaught man can follow. To a certain 
extent every man in this busy country of ours is in- 
fluenced by these considerations. We have no recog- 
nized aristocracy, and no entailed estates, and therefore 
no man, among us, can be sure in advance that he will 
never need to make his own way in the world. 

"With the people for whose benefit chiefly I write, 
those who are compelled to educate themselves without 
teachers, the practical utility of, education is often of 
course the main consideration ; but even these would do 
well to keep before them the higher purpose of culture, 
which is to fit the man for his most perfect work in life, 
to make him, as nearly as his natural capacity will allow, 
a completely cultured man, balanced, trained to the use 
of all his faculties and able to command their highest 
and best exercise at will That even people without 
the advantages of academic training may accomplish 
something like this is sufficiently seen in the fact that 
the present editor of the Atlantic Monthly, a scholar, a 
poet, an author and a critic, with certainly very few if 
any superiors in America, in the matter of refined and 
varied culture, left school to learn a trade at the age of 
ten, and has never had a master since. 

Everybody is not a Mr. Howells, however, and few 
young men can hope to accomplish all that he has ; but 
failing in that, it is well that the student shall feel the 
high possibilities of his life and appreciate the nobler 



10 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUKSELF. 

purposes of his work. While he labors to fit himself 
for his business, he will work none the less earnestly 
for feeling thatv his study is making him more and 
more the man nature intended that he should be. 

THE COMPAEATIVE VALUES OE VAKIOUS STUDIES. 

Whether the student contemplates a brief course or 
an extended one, it is equally necessary for him to se- 
lect his studies with reference first to their comparative 
intrinsic values, and secondly with reference to their 
comparative values to him individually. To do this in- 
telligently he must bear in mind that there are two dis- 
tinct uses of study. The first of these is the acquisition 
of 'knowledge, and the second is intellectual training. 

Each is good in its kind. Each has a practical value. 
The man who knows arithmetic finds daily use for the 
mere knowledge he has gained, in all the affairs of life. 
But the value of the mental discipline he has received 
in the study of arithmetic, while it may be less appa- 
rent, is no less real than the other. And this is true 
too of every other branch of a well-ordered education. 
Each is doubly useful. Each helps to train the mind 
to proper action, and each furnishes some knowledge 
which is of use in itself. But all are not equally valua- 
ble in either of these ways, and the proportion of time 
and attention to be given to each should be regulated 
with reference to their comparative importance. 

HEEBEET SPENCEB's CLASSIFICATION. 

Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his work on education, has 
attempted to make an elaborate classification of the va- 
rious subjects of study, and to arrange them in the order 



HOW TO MARK OUT A COURSE OF. STUDY. 11 

of their relative comparative importance, a task that he 
is as well qualified as anybody else, perhaps, to perform, 
but one in which even he has only partially succeeded. 
Such a classification in a manual like this, intended 
mainly for students without masters, would be mani- 
festly impracticable, and hence nothing of the kind is 
attempted. I prefer to offer some plain suggestions 
which will aid the student to ascertain for himself just 
what he wants. 

THE FACTORS INVOLVED. 

In the first place, then, it is necessary to take into ac- 
count your age and whatever other circumstances there 
may be which tend to limit you in point of time. 

If you are already grown, with the cares of business 
about you, your time for self-education is necessarily 
very limited, and your selection of studies must of 
course be made with reference to this fact, so that you 
may not spend any portion of your scanty leisure upon 
that which is not absolutely essential. Take an inven- 
tory of the time at your disposal, as you would of your 
capital before entering upon business, in order that you 
may invest it wisely. 

It is next necessary to ask yourself what your practi- 
cal necessities are in the matter of learning ; what your 
business in life is, or is to be ; what information you 
will especially need in that business, and what studies 
will give you the necessary knowledge. And this is 
clearly a point worthy of attention in any case, whether 
the education is to be abundant or scanty. To the man 
who intends to make himself a physician, for instance, 
a knowledge of chemistry is of prime importance, 
while the higher mathematics furnish him very little of 



12 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUKSELF. 

any immediate value. To the one who would be an en- 
gineer, on the other hand, mathematics is the one thing 
especially needful. I am speaking now with reference 
solely to the value of the information gained in these 
studies, and not of their value as intellectual exercises. 
Decide then, secondly, what you want in the matter of 
learning — what studies will give you the information 
you most need for the accomplishment of your ends, 
whatever these may be. 

The third point to be determined in settling upon a 
course of study is more difficult, and in the very nature 
of things can never be very accurately decided in the be- 
ginning by the student himself. Simply stated, the 
question is, " What mental discipline do I need ?" and 
it is one which should recur at every step of the stu- 
dent's progress. It is one which every cultivated man 
asks himself constantly. It governs the already accom- 
plished scholar in the selection of his books for reading- 
even more than it influences the student in marking out 
his course of study, and it can never be wholly deter- 
mined in advance. Just here comes in the higher pur- 
pose of education, the making of a well-balanced man, 
It is the training of all the faculties to their fullest capa- 
city, the development of all the forces, the just subjec- 
tion of each to the whole, that fits the man for his most 
perfect work, and most completely fulfills the purpose 
of education; and the nearer we come to this ideal con- 
dition of perfect and symmetrical development, in body, 
mind and morals, the better are we prepared for the 
successful pursuit of our especial businesses in life. 

But aside from this, in nearly every profession and 
trade there exists a necessity for mental discipline in 
specific directions. A special intellectual development 



HOW TO MARK OUT A COURSE OF STUDY. 13 

is of practical value, just as the possession of a partic- 
ular kind of information is, and to this extent the espe- 
cial needs of the student in the matter of intellectual 
culture as a preparation for a specific business career 
may be decided in advance with tolerable accuracy. In 
a large degree, indeed, the culture made necessary by 
merely economic considerations depends upon the 
character of the student himself. If he be of dreamy 
mood, visionary, absent, lacking control of his intellect- 
ual operations, the mathematics and the physical 
sciences will tend of course to correct the fault, and 
will have a value to him which they would otherwise 
lack. And so with every other branch of study. Each 
may serve to correct some intellectual fault, to supply 
an intellectual want, or to strengthen the man in a 
point of weakness. And in deciding what and how 
much to study, reference must of course be had to the 
peculiar intellectual needs that are to be supplied. Let 
the student, then, after he has taken a fair inventory of 
the time at his disposal, ask himself — ■ 

1st. What knowledge do I most need f 

2nd. What culture do I most need f 

And when he shall have answered these questions, his 
way will be clear to the marking out of a course of 
study suited to his especial case. 

But let him remember that in all knowledge there is 
profit, and that the wider his culture is, the more nearly 
he will come to the perfection of manhood at which he 
should aim, the better prepared he will be to do his 
best work. While he must consider first his actual and 
immediate educational wants, he should never lose 
sight of the fact that the course of study he has 
marked out for himself will supply these but imper- 



14 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

fectly, and that other knowledge and other culture are 
desirable, not only in a general way, but also as bear- 
ing directly upon his success in life. With this in view 
he will find abundant opportunity, while pursuing his 
prescribed course of study and reading, to widen it 
somewhat at times; and by some of the modes of econ- 
omizing time and labor suggested elsewhere in this vol- 
ume, he may almost certainly enlarge the range of both 
the information and the culture he has prescribed for 
himself. 

For the sake of convenience let me briefly sum up 
the spirit of what I have said thus far, in direct sen- 
tences : 

Take an inventory of the time at your disposal, that 
you may knoiv how much you can study. 

Do not attempt too much, lest you become discouraged 
and fail altogether. 

On the other hand, remember that ivithin the limits 
imposed by your circumstances, the more you shall mas- 
ter the better educated you will be. 

Select your studies with reference first to the value of 
the learning they will give you, and secondly to the value 
of the culture their mastery will bring. 

Give the preference to those branches which will tend 
most directly to fit you for your special business, bid 
enlarge your culture and information as opportunity shall 
offer. 

Such are the general principles that should guide the 
student in marking out his course of study, and to a 
large extent each must apply them for himself ; but 
some more specific directions may be of service, and in 
fulfillment of my design to make this manual as largely 
useful as possible, I give them in their proper places. 



CHAPTEE II. 

COMMON SCHOOL STUDIES. 

THE WASTE OF TIME. 

It is a singular fact, perhaps, but a fact nevertheless 
which everybody except the teachers themselves recog- 
nizes, that there is a larger proportion of useless work 
expended in the common sehools than anywhere else. 
Many of the branches taught there are wholly useless 
in themselves, and nearly all the others are so overload- 
ed with unimportant details that the pupil loses sight 
of their real purpose and quits them at last, wearied 
with misspent labor, having gained but little of the in- 
formation or culture they should have brought him. 

OF GEOGKAPHY 

I have already spoken. Pupils spend years in study- 
ing text-books not one tenth part of which is worth 
learning, while not one twentieth of their contents is 
ever remembered. As soon as the examinations are 
over the student begins to forget — forgetting much 
more rapidly than he learned — and in forgetting, he 
sometimes loses the useful with the useless parts. 

Clearly there is too much geography taught. The 
books are too large and too numerous. They have alto- 



16 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

gether too many details in them, and moreover, no 
book whatever is necessary to the learning of all that 
anybody except a professional geographer or a naviga- 
tor needs to know of geography. A brief examination 
of the globes and a few weeks' earnest study of good 
maps will serve to give the student a fair general know- 
ledge of geography, and this is all that anybody not 
professionally pursuing geographical studies ever re- 
members or needs to remember. Reference to a map is 
always readily made when fuller information on any 
particular point is wanted, just as reference to a dic- 
tionary or encyclopaedia is, and to attempt to learn and 
remember all the facts of geography in detail is almost 
as absurd as it would be to commit an unabridged dic- 
tionary to memory as an introduction to English. 

HOW TO STUDY GEOGRAPHY. 

I say, therefore, to the student without a master, 
waste no time in the study of geographies. Learn the 
general outlines and relative localities of seas and con- 
tinents by examining the globe, and then give yourself 
to a progressive study of maps until you are familiar 
with the chief facts of geography — that is to say, till 
you know the relative localities and the general outlines 
of all the countries, the nationality and general features 
of the chief rivers, ranges of mountains, etc., and the 
places of the world's great cities, etc., on the maps. 

Take first a general map of each continent ; then one of 
each country ; and finish your study of the subject by a 
careful scrutiny of the State and local maps of your 
own country. When you shall have done this you will 
have a good general knowledge of geography, and very 



COMMON SCHOOL STUDIES. 17 

few people have more thaD this, or need more. An oc- 
casional reference to good maps, afterwards will perserve 
and greatly add to the information thus gained. 

ARITHMETIC, 

of course, everybody needs to know, and it cannot 
be learned too thoroughly. But in the ordinary way 
of teaching and learning it, a good deal of time is wasted, 
and the best results are rarely secured. There is a 
good deal of unnecessary matter in the text-books, and 
that which is necessary is too often so put as to lead 
the student to lose sight of its proper purpose, and 
thus lose the advantage he should gain from its study. 
Let the student bear in mind from first to last that 
everything in Mathematics is fact ; that every fact 
there has been discovered and nothing invented. Let 
him remember that what are commonly called rules are 
not rules at all, but that each is merely a statement of 
one of the ways in which certain principles may be 
applied to the solution of certain classes of problems, 
and that more than one of these principles may be used 
in almost every case. Let me explain this a little 
more at length. The student finds many pages de- 
voted to common fractions, and a like number to deci- 
mals. Under each head is arranged a number of pro- 
blems, together with a rule for working them. By all 
the arrangements made for him, by the classifications 
of the book, by the traditions of the schoolroom, and 
by every other direct and indirect means, he is forced 
to the conclusion that some of these problems are of a 
kind to be solved by the one rule, while the others are 
of a totally different character and can be wrought only 
upon the other principle. Of course any teacher, upon 



18 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUBSELF. 

being questioned, would tell a student that this is not 
the case ; but there is really nothing in the ordinary way 
of learning and teaching arithmetic to suggest such 
questioning, and, with one remarkable exception, I 
have never known a teacher who thought it necessary 
or desirable to explain the point without waiting for 
accident to suggest inquiry I would have the student 
remember constantly that Addition, Subtraction, Multi- 
plication and Division, are the only fundamental rules of 
arithmetic, and that all the others are but applications 
of these. He should bear in mind also that the various 
problems given may each be solved in more than one 
way — that their solution is not the object of his study ; 
that their solution is not a matter of any importance 
whatever, except as it exercises him in the application 
of the principles involved and verifies the correctness 
and accuracy of his understanding. With these points 
established in his mind, let him go to work to learn 
each of the principles involved, — that is to say, let him 
pass nothing that he does not fully understand, let him 
accept nothing as true until he fully understands the 
fact that it is true, and the reason why it is true ; or, if 
he must pass it, let him refer to it again and again until 
he does understand it. He will then need no rules, and 
will not be dependent, in after life, upon a fallacious 
memory for rules, which, even if remembered correctly, 
might readily be misapplied by one who had failed to 
master the principles involved. 

Teachers sometimes tell pupils all this, and some of 
them succeed in impressing the fact upon the minds 
of those under their tuition, but in altogether too many 
cases their system of teaching makes it easy for the 
parrot pupil to make a better show than the one who 



COMMON SCHOOL STUDIES. 19 

labors over principles, and thus there is an immediate 
and constant temptation before every pupil to do that 
which the teacher is continually cautioning him 
not to do. On the other hand there are teachers whose 
indolence or incompetence leads them to omit even 
the verbal caution, while the student without a mas- 
ter stands in especial need of the warning. 

I remember a schoolfellow of my own who went 
with me through the arithmetic, solved every problem, 
knew every rule, and was regarded as fellow of the 
best of us. His practice was to commit each rule to 
memory, and to follow it clause by clause in the work- 
ing of every problem under it. He passed good exam- 
inations, of course, and afterwards graduated well in a 
commercial college. I happened to be with him ten 
years later, when he was attempting to fill the post of 
bill clerk in a commission house. His calculations for 
several days went unchallenged, as the bookkeeper 
was overburdened with other duties and supposed him 
competent. Before his first week ended, however, he 
came hurriedly from his desk to ask confidentially 
about a point in his practical arithmetic. He had to 
calculate the total value of a given number of bushels 
of corn at $1.08 per bushel. He had set the figures 
down in the ordinary way, had multiplied by the eight, 
and now wanted to know what to do with the nought ! 
Of course in school, while his " rules " were fresh in his 
mind, no such difficulty had bothered him ; but now, 
remembering no verbal rule for the case, he was unable 
to work this simple problem in multiplication. The 
case is an extreme one, doubtless, but it serves to illus- 
trate the importance of the precept I am endeavoring 
to impress upon the reader. I would have him uufW 



20 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

stand each operation as he makes it — comprehend each 
principle before he undertakes to use it, and know why 
he does each thing as soon as he learns that he is to do 
it. To do this by means of books only is often diffi- 
cult. The principles are all explained, of course, in 
every good arithmetic, but the explanations are not al- 
ways sufficiently lucid, and the student often falls into 
the delusion of thinking that he understands a matter 
because he can repeat the explanation, even when this 
explanation is by no means clear to his comprehension. 
To remedy this there is nothing so good as a resort to 
object lessons. I have had occasion to explain difficul- 
ties of this class to a good many pupils, mauy of them 
advanced far beyond the point where the difficulty oc- 
curred; and I have found a resort to the simplest forms 
of numbers, and an explanation by means of actual, 
tangible objects, far better than anything else possible. 

In one instance, I remember, a bright, keen-witted 
girl who was studying algebra came to me for assist- 
ance. I explained the problem in hand so that she 
could work it readily, but I saw that she only dimly 
comprehended my most labored explanations of the 
principles involved, and I was not satisfied with this. 
I questioned her to ascertain where her difficulty lay, 
and was led presently to ask her : 

" Do you understand the multiplication and division 
of fractions ?" 

" Algebraic fractions ?" she asked. 

" Fractions of any kind," said I. " Do you know, 
for instance, why the division of any quantity by a frac- 
tion gives a result larger than the dividend ?" 

" No," she said, she had never been able to under- 
stand that, and although she had gone conscientiously 



COMMON SCHOOL STUDIES. 21 

through the arithmetic to the entire satisfaction of her 
teachers, she had never felt that she understood the 
principles involved in the working of fractions. 

I took a score of apples, and undertook to teach her 
in a single lesson what years of schooling had left un- 
taught. 

I showed her how every reduction in the size of the 
divisor increased the result. Going downward gradu- 
ally, I reached one as the divisor, which gave, of 
course, just twice as large a result as two had given. 
Then with a knife I made halves of the apples, and 
taking one of these in my hand, as a divisor, I was 
about to continue the explanation, when she fairly 
clapped her hands for joy. She saw the principle and 
understood now not only this, but every other fact she 
had learned concerning fractions, because she now 
knew practically just what fractions were. She at once 
adopted the plan with herself, and she has mastered the 
higher mathematics without a teacher, and almost with- 
out a serious difficulty. 

I give the incident because it illustrates what I 
mean, shows the value of object-teaching, and may 
serve to guide some teacherless student in making use 
of objects in working out his own lessons.* 

The student who thus masters every principle as he 
goes on will make slow progress, perhaps, at first, but in 
doing this he is laying a foundation for much more rapid 
as well as much more satisfactory learning after a little 
while. As soon as he clearly sees what figures mean, 



* Of course nobody will imagine for a moment that 1 put this plan forward 
as in any sense new. It is only part of the great system of object-teaching 
known to every intelligent instructor, bet used far less generally than it 
should be. 



22 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

and learns to associate them with their meanings, 
mathematics loses its abstract character, its study be- 
comes an agreeable one, and the relations of numbers 
to each other become clear, unmistakable facts to his 
mind, which he has no difficulty in comprehending. 
And this relation of numbers to each other is all there 
is of arithmetic. 

Let me add one suggestion which I have found of va- 
lue in a great many cases. There is nothing so good as 
concrete study, and the student of arithmetic should 
make an exercise out of every combination of numbers he 
can get outside of his arithmetic. When he reads in a 
newspaper, for instance, that there were two hundred 
and fifty-six persons on board a wrecked vessel, of whom 
twenty-eight were drowned and eight died of exposure, 
he has an excellent exercise in the calculation of the 
various percentages involved. And so with a hundred 
other things. Excellent problems may be made out of 
the dimensions of every room in the house, out of every 
planted field, out of everything in fact around the stu- 
dent, and these may be made to involve precisely the 
principles he most wishes to study, whether they be 
those of arithmetic or those of the higher mathematics. 

They have the advantage too of being real, practical 
problems, involving tangible facts, and there is no bet- 
ter way of making one's self a perfect master of arith- 
metic than by the persistent use of these every-day ob- 
ject-lessons with which we are all surrounded. Let the 
student practice making them for himself, and he will 
find no lack of material for his purpose. 

Under another title in this volume I shall endeavor 
to show how a somewhat similar process may be made 
to contribute very largely to the student's progress in 



COMMON SCHOOL STUDIES. 23 

things other than arithmetic, and to enlarge his culture 
even more rapidly than the regular study of books can 
do. 

We come now to 

THE STUDY OF ENGLISH. 

As our own language is the vehicle through which 
we communicate our thoughts to others and receive 
their ideas in return, of course every American needs 
to know English thoroughly. Looking at the matter 
from the lowest plane it is easy enough to see that a 
mastery of English has a decided pecuniary value to its 
possessor. In large commercial houses the accom- 
plished English scholar who sits at the correspondent's 
desk usually receives double the salary paid to the much 
harder-worked bookkeeper, in spite of the fact that the 
latter brings to the business the capital of a technical 
skill. And there are scores of other ways in which a 
thorough knowledge of one's mother tongue may be 
made to pay, while its absence is often fatal to success. 
An ill-spelled letter, an ungrammatical remark — these 
and similar things have cost many a failure. 

The money value of English study is by no means 
small, but aside from this, there can be no question of 
the fact that the study of English, properly followed, 
brings with it nearly, if not quite, as much of intellect- 
ual culture as the study of any other language, and 
with these facts in view, I think there can be 
no doubt that next to elementary arithmetic there 
is nothing more important in a common school 
education than the study of English. And yet it 
seems singularly neglected. Not one in fifty, even 
of classically educated men, can write a single 



24 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF, 

page in perfectly accurate English. This may appear 
to be an extravagant statement, but I make it after a 
careful examination of results, and am convinced that 
it by no means goes beyond the fact. A great many 
cannot even write in tolerably good English, while the 
number of people who can spell correctly is so small 
that I have known more than one person to argue that 
the ability to spell is " a gift," — that it comes, as high 
musical attainments do, only to those who have especial 
intellectual endowments in that direction. The absurd- 
ity of such a theory is too manifest to need demonstra- 
tion. A memory which receives and retains the ten 
thousand occurrences of every day life is certainly 
equal to the task of remembering the order of letters 
in our constantly used words, particularly as the sound 
actively aids the memory in this matter, as it does not 
in ordinary affairs. 

THE FAILURE OF THE GRAMMARS. 

A thorough and accurate knowledge of English is of 
very great value to all. But while I think it im- 
possible to attach too much importance to the study of 
English, I do not regard our grammars, as they are 
written, as of much use in any case, while to a great 
many people they are simply stumbling-blocks. Mr. 
Eichard Grant White has shown, and most thinking 
people had already discovered, that our whole system 
of conjugating verbs after the manner of the Latin 
language is an absurdity ; that " I might have been 
loved " is no more a part of the verb " to love " than is 
any other phrase in which " love " or " loved " occurs. 
Our language is almost wholly without verbal inflections, 
and the translation of a Latin verb in its different 



COMMON SCHOOL STUDIES. 25 

moods and tenses into English phrases of the same 
meaning, certainly does not give moods and tenses in 
English. Indeed, the grammarians have been singu- 
larly inconsistent in this. If the English phrase by 
which we express the thing that the Romans meant 
when they used the first person, singular number, sub- 
junctive mood, future perfect tense of the verb " Amo " is 
properly called, in English, a like inflection of the verb 
" to love," then the same rule should apply to nouns, ad- 
jectives, etc., and we should have the word " man " de- 
clined, in English, as follows : 



Nominative, 


A man. 


Genitive, 


Of a man. 


Dative, 


To or for a man. 


Accusative, 


A man. 


Vocative, 


man. 


Ablative, 


With, from, in, or by a man. 



But we have nothing of the sort in any of the gram- 
mars. Our grammarians have translated the Latin 
verbs into English phrases and named these after the 
inflections of which they have the force, while they 
wholly omit to do the same thing with the nouns, 

This is but one of many absurdities, which this is 
not the place to point out, and I have only given a 
single illustration for the sake of suggesting rather than 
explaining to the reader, my reasons for saying that 
while I regard the study of English grammar as of the 
utmost importance, I think the study of English gram- 
mars almost wholly useless in all cases, and actually 
hurtful in many. 

Let it be understood, then, that what the student 
wants is to study English grammar whether he studies 



26 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUKSELF. 

English grammars or not. I would have him learn the 
structure, the philosophy, the origin, and the use of his 
mother tongue, and I am convinced that there are 
better ways of doing this than the one ordinarily 
adopted, in the chewing of dry husks at the bidding of 
a grammarian who defines an. adverb to be "a word 
which qualifies or limits a verb, adjective, or other 
adverb," and then proceeds to tell the pupil that the 
word " yes " is an adverb, in spite of the fact that no 
sentence can possibly be formed in which this word 
will in any way qualify or limit anything whatever. 
The ordinary system of studying English is slow, irk- 
some, and productive of poor results in the great ma- 
jority of cases. That there is a much better way I am 
fully convinced, and it is one of the purposes of this 
chapter to explain to the student what this better way 
is. 

The English grammars very correctly define English 
grammar to be " the art of speaking and writing the 
English language correctly," though they proceed to 
treat of many things in no way embraced in this defi- 
nition, while they omit many of the essentials to such 
an art. 

HOW TO STUDY GEAMMAE. 

Discarding their system and accepting their defini- 
tion, we find that in order to speak and write the Eng- 
lish language correctly, it is necessary to know 

Id. How to pronounce the words ; 

2nd. How to spell the words ; 

3rd What the words mean ; 

Ath. How to frame them into correct sentences. 



COMMON SCHOOL STUDIES. 2f 



PRONUNCIATION. 

We learn the correct pronunciation of most words as 
we learn the words themselves, by hearing others use 
them. Analogy gives us the sound of many others, 
and for the rest, errors are corrected and doubts easily 
solved by reference to the dictionaries. 

SPELLING. 

It cannot be denied that the orthography of our lan- 
guage is a difficult one. It follows few analogies, it has 
many redundancies, it is often awkward, and in a gene- 
ral way, there are no principles governing it. Some 
attempts have been made to frame rules for spelling, 
but these for the most part are of small value, covering 
but a meagre list of words, and admitting of many ex- 
ceptions. There are but two of them that I have 
found of practical value to anybody. One of these is 
that monosyllables and words accented on the last syl- 
lable, ending in a single consonant, preceded by a sin- 
gle vowel, double the final consonant before an addi- 
tion beginning with a vowel. It is a long rule, covering 
a very short list of words. It may enable a student to 
avoid spelling such words as " beginning," " plotting," 
" shipping," etc., with a single " n," " t," or " p," but 
beyond this it is of no service whatever. The other 
rule to which I refer is that the diphthong " ei " usu- 
ally follows " c," while its companion, " ie," is generally 
used after other consonants ; for example, in the words 
" receive," " deceive," '" perceive," etc., the " e " takes 
precedence, while the " i " comes first in such words as 
"field," "shield," "believe," "relieve," " chief," "thief," 
etc. This rule serves a good purpose, inasmuch as it 



28 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

meets a very common difficulty, but there are a good 
many exceptions to if, and they greatly lessen its value. 

As these are the best of the rules given in any of the 
grammars, and the best that can be given, it will be 
seen at once that English spelling must be learned to a 
great extent arbitrarily, but a little industry and atten- 
tion will enable any student to master it. 

To a very great extent we absorb a knowledge of spell- 
ing in our daily reading. The original process of learning 
to read is itself a learning to spell, and as we read words 
correctly spelled in our newspapers and books, we natur- 
ally fall into the way of spelling most of them aright. 
Every person who reads must learn to spell at least 
half the words in our commonly used vocabulary. This 
far we are all able to spell, but there is no reason why 
any student should habitually spell any considerable 
number of words badly ; no reason, at any rate, except 
that the system by which spelling is commonly taught 
is an essentially bad one. Everybody knows what that 
system is, and everybody knows too how imperfectly it 
accomplishes its purpose. It is like all other parrot- 
teaching, in that its results are rapidly lost as soon as 
the attention is given to something else. 

Experience and observation have combined to convince 
me that no person can be taught to spell, but that any 
person may learn to spell. In other words, I am convinc- 
ed that no teacher of spelling is either necessary or useful 
to persons who can read and write. If the student would 
learn to spell words, let him use words. Let him write 
every day, and in writing, whenever he shall come to a 
word which he does not certainly know how to sx3ell, 
let him look for it in his dictionary, examining its deri- 
vation as well as its spelling. ~Then let him look also at 



COMMON SCHOOL STUDIES. 29 

all the words derived from it, and when this is done he 
will never hesitate again as to the orthography of any 
of them. 

To do this as an exercise is easy enough of course, 
but when one is writing for other purposes he is apt 
to find it more convenient to ask some one else how 
to spell the word, or even to guess at it, than to go 
to his dictionary ; and just here is the common point of 
failure. A spelling so arbitrary as ours is can only be 
mastered by industry, and the student who has not in- 
dustry enough to examine the dictionary for himself in 
every case, has no right to hope for anything like com- 
plete success. I cannot too strongly impress the stu- 
dent with the necessity of holding himself strictly to 
this rule. It may consume valuable time at first, but 
the occasions for going to the dictionary will rapidly di- 
minish in frequency under a faithful following of the 
plan suggested, and the results will fully compensate 
him for all the trouble taken. 

Inattention is a fruitful source of ill spelling. I 
mean by this not merely that in moments of inatten- 
tion we are apt to spell incorrectly words that we know 
how to spell, but also that by inattention the student 
loses many opportunities of learning the orthography 
of words for the first time. I can best explain this by 
a few examples of the simplest kind. I have seen the 
word " preparation " spelled with an " e " in the second 
syllable, simply because the writer failed to remember 
that "preparation" is a derivation of "prepare." Hard- 
ly a day passes in which I do not see " separate " or 
some of its derivatives similarly misspelled by "people 
who know Latin reasonably well, and know that the 
Latin word from which our " separate " comes is a com- 



30 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUKSELF. 

pound one, made up of " se " and " parare." A very 
little measure of attention would show them the abso- 
lute necessity, there is for an " a " in the second sylla- 
ble, and yet I find an " e " there in eleven out of six- 
teen instances now before me, all of them taken from 
the manuscript of educated men, who could give the^ 
derivation of the word without a moment's hesitation. 
These are but two cases cited here by way of illustra- 
tion. Scores of others might easily be added, but my 
purpose now is simply to suggest the way in which a 
little care and attention may be made to serve the stu- 
dent in learning to spell accurately. 

LEARNING THE MEANINGS OF WORDS. 

In some sort we absorb a knowledge of the mean- 
ings of words, but the popular use of words is by no 
means always a very accurate one, and the nicer dis- 
tinctions which constitute at once the beauty and the 
power of language are often wholly lost in our common 
speech. A good knowledge of these is of the first im- 
portance to the student who aspires to become any- 
thing like a good English scholar. For the accomplish- 
ment of this, methods very similar to those I have in- 
dicated for use in learning to spell will be found indis- 
pensable. Whenever the student hears, sees or uses a 
word of which he does not know the full and precise 
meaning, with its synonyms and their departures from 
absolute synonymy, he should at once make the word a 
study, examining his dictionary carefully for all the in- 
formation there given on the subject, and comparing 
the word with its synonyms for the sake of learning 
the peculiarities of each, and the purpose each serves in 
our speech. The amount and variety of information to 



COMMON SCHOOL STUDIES. ■ 31 

be acquired in this way is very much greater than most 
students will imagine, and there is no better or more 
rapid way of learning English than precisely this. But 
to do this worthily will require a good deal of industry, 
and it may even cause some inconvenience at times. In- 
dolence and self-indulgence are greatly in the way in this 
as in all other attempts to learn anything thoroughly. 

In thus studying the spelling and the meaning of 
words, the student will find it an excellent plan to carry 
a memorandum-book in which to write down, when a 
dictionary is not at hand, words of which he wishes to 
make studies. 

In the study of meanings, too, a little attention to 
the forms, kinships, derivations, etc., of the words will 
be found of quite as great assistance as a similar pro- 
cess is in the matter of spelling. This is especially the 
case with people who know anything of Latin, Greek, 
French or Anglo-Saxon, because to such persons a 
large number of our English words bear their meaning 
on their faces, if only the student takes care to look for 
it. But even people who know nothing of any lan- 
guage except their own will find in many words traces 
of their origin, from which all their nicer shades of 
meaning are at once apparent. Aside from the time 
saved by this process when it is applicable, it has the 
greater merit of supplying a much more thorough and 
accurate knowledge of the words and their uses that 
any study of mere definitions can give. 

It would seem at the first glance that this habit of 
analytical attention to the formation of words, would 
so commend itself to every one as to need no mention 
here, but I am convinced that the fact is otherwise. I 
have known many good Latin scholars to habitually 



32 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

use the word " transpire" as the equivalent of "happen," 
and certainly no one familiar with Latin could possibly 
fall into such an error, except with eyes shut to the 
transparent formation of the word so misused. And 
the same thing happens every day with hundreds of 
other words, that express their meaning in the very 
syllables and letters of which they are composed, and 
yet are constantly misused by people who ought to 
know better, and do know better, if they would only 
trouble themselves to think of the matter. 

THE STKUCTUBE OE SENTENCES. 

Words, taken separately, are of no value. They are 
but the bricks out of which the building, language, is 
constructed, and we no sooner begin to learn their 
meanings than we begin also to learn how to put them 
together into intelligible sentences. We learn this in a 
rude way, just as we learn approximate meanings, by 
absorption from the people around us. As we grow 
older our reading greatly increases our information on 
this subject, at the same time correcting many of the 
errors adopted from oral speech. But to learn the ge- 
nius of the language, to master its idiom, to compre- 
hend its principles, and to acquire so thorough a mas- 
tery over it as to make it a soft clay in our hands which 
we can mould as we will to our uses, are ends that can 
be accomplished only by long and earnest work. 

Let us look a little into the processes. In the gram- 
mars we have the dry husks of syntax, simple enough, 
and even tolerably interesting to people who have al- 
ready learned all that these are intended to teach, but 
quite useless and almost wholly unintelligible to the 
student seeking to learn these things. The grammars 



COMMON SCHOOL STUDIE.?. 33 

tell of moods and tenses, with names that are anything 
but indicative to the boys and girls who are expected to 
use them. Then follow " rules," varying in number ac- 
cording to the fancy of the grammarian — rules like 
those in the arithmetics, that are simply statements of 
facts, that teach no principles, and are of no manner of 
use, except in the solution of the syntactical problems 
arrayed under them as exercises. Doubtless some peo- 
ple have learned English from these grammars, but in 
the main their use is certainly of questionable advan- 
tage. Dull pupils cannot comprehend them ; bright 
ones get on better, in the study of English, without them. 

There is no better way of learning the structure of 
any complicated thing than by taking it to pieces and 
putting it together again, and there is no better way of 
learning the English language, certainly. Indeed, the 
writers of the ordinary grammars recognize this fact, 
and their whole effort is to instruct and practice the 
student in doing just this. But I think with Mr. 
White, and a good many other lovers of idiomatic En- 
glish, that our grammarians have been misled by the 
old scholastic influences into an attempt to make our 
speech conform to the Latin, and so have built upon it 
an unphilosophical system of inflections, and encum- 
bered it with a set of rules that have no root in the na- 
ture of the language itself. The limitations of this 
manual would not admit of the discussion of this sub- 
ject here, even if the view I take had not been already 
ably maintained by the author to whose work I have 
referred. 

But while I do not think any ordinary grammar 
necessary or very useful to the student who has 
no master, there are text-books on English gram- 



34 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

mar which will aid him greatly in his study of the lan- 
guage. Such a book as Greene's Analysis, for in- 
stance, in which parts of speech, and conjugations and 
rules of syntax, and all the cumbrous technicalities of 
grammars are wholly done away with, while the author 
leads the student step by step from the simplest to the 
most complex of sentences, analyzing them and show- 
ing the student the nature and office of every part, will 
be found invaluable. There are several text-books of 
the sort, in which the English language is treated phi- 
losophically and rationally, with but few technicalities ; 
but the one named is one of the best for the self-teach- 
ing student, in that it is one of the simplest. 

But just here it is well to remind the reader that the 
book, even if it shall be thoroughly mastered, will not 
teach him English. As he studies its pages he should 
form the habit of going outside of them and questioning 
the sentences he reads elsewhere for confirmation and il- 
lustration of the text. He should make exercises every 
day of the books or papers within his reach, and of the 
remarks made in his presence. This will serve not only 
to fasten in his mind the principles laid down in .the 
text, but also to show him the departures from them 
that are common in conversation, and he will soon learn 
to know which of these are errors to be avoided at all 
times, and which are simply conversational idioms, ad- 
missible as such, but not authorized for other purposes. 

HIGHER ENGLISH. 

From the Analysis, and from this daily application of 
its teachings, the student will learn the laws governing 
the language. 

Having faithfully followed the system of study indi- 



COMMON SCHOOL STUDIES. 35 

cated, lie will now have learned how to pronounce the 
words ; how to spell the words ; what the words mean ; 
and how to put them together into sentences. In 
other words he will know how to speak and write the 
English language correctly. He will have learned the 
grammar of our tongue. 

But many people can speak and write the language 
correctly who cannot speak or write it well. Many 
people who never use an incorrect sentence, never frame 
a graceful one. Correct English may be, and often is 
very stiff English, and the student who has gone this 
far is by no means master of the language as yet. He 
has still to learn how to write and speak in graceful 
sentences, and how to handle the tongue deftly, as an 
infinitely flexible instrument, completely under his 
control. 

Such a mastery over English is acquired, of course, 
by very few people, comparatively, but the end is one so 
worthy that the student should spare no effort to ac- 
complish it as fully as possible, and every approach to 
it is a step in the direction of ripe scholarship of the 
very best sort. 

The means that have been employed to this end are 
various, and almost every student will be able to add to 
my suggestions many valuable exercises of his own. 
Indeed these self-devised lessons are often the very- 
best ones possible for the student, inasmuch as they 
commonly spring from a known and felt necessity of 
his own, and therefore supply the wants of his peculiar 
temperament and circumstances much more directly 
than any exercise suggested by others can possibly do. 
I shall confine myself therefore to the recommendation 
of plans which I have known to work well, urging the 



36 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

student to vary them whenever he finds that a change 
will better adapt them to his own particular case. 

An approved text-book on English composition will 
supply a good deal of needed information, while it will 
furnish also the rules governing good English speech, 
and guide the student in the correction of inelegances 
of phrase. (Dr. John S. Hart's very admirable series of 
text-books are probably the best, especially for self- 
instructed students.) No text-book on the subject aims 
to do more than this, and indeed none can do more. 
The rest must be learned from extensive reading, or by 
means of exercises, and these, as I have said, may be 
varied almost at will. The one most commonly em- 
ployed in the schools is composition-writing, and this, 
with a competent teacher as critic, is ordinarily found 
to be extremely valuable. 

Even without criticism the practice of telling things 
in writing will bring with it a certain degree of fluency 
and ease in the use of language, and every student of 
English should write something every day. If the 
thing that he writes shall prove not to be a composition, 
in the school-room sense ol the term, it will be so much 
the better, simply because in real life people talk very 
little about abstract matters, while it is only the thor- 
oughly earnest and thoroughly practical teacher who 
succeeds in making his composition-writers treat of any- 
thing else. 

Let the student who would master English, then, 
write something every day. If he simply tells a homely 
anecdote, or relates the incidents of the day, or gives 
an account of something he has seen, to an imaginary 
circle of readers, or if he writes down what he has 
thought upon any subject, the result will probably be 



COMMON SCHOOL STUDIES. 37 

worth nothing in a literary way, but its writer will have 
had an excellent lesson in English. 

There is another admirable exercise, closely akin to 
this. It was technically known in the High School 
where it originated as "narration ;" certain pupils were 
named, each day, as the narrators for the following day, 
and each was required to take the rostrum and tell 
something to the school. They were allowed to tell 
anything they chose, but always in their own words, 
and the rapidity with which the pupils improved in 
their manner of saying what they had to say, not only 
on the rostrum but equally in other places, was very 
marked. The student without a school may quietly 
exercise himself in a similar way in the company of his 
fellows without letting anybody into his secret. An 
audience is an audience, whether its members are aware 
of the fact or not. 

Another excellent plan is to take sentences from 
books, or elsewhere, and practice expressing their ideas 
in a variety of other forms. It is best to take single 
sentences at first, and to see in how many ways you 
can express the same ideas, using the same words or 
others as convenience may dictate. Then take two or 
three sentences on a single subject and repeat the pro- 
cess, practicing also the expression of the ideas con- 
tained in your two or three sentences, in a single, com- 
pound, or complex sentence. Reversing the process, 
take a long compound or complex sentence, and break 
it up into a number of simple ones, fully expressing the 
same idea. 

This much may be done mentally, when the materials 
for writing are not at hand, when the student is at 
work, or when he is walking, or riding, or doing any- 



38 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

thing else that does not require his constant attention, 
in pursuance of the habit of thought-education sug- 
gested elsewhere in this volume. 

When you shall have -acquired a good degree of 
facility in this exercise, a somewhat more elaborate 
application of the principle will be found of very great 
advantage. Eead a very short article of any kindf and 
then turning away from it write down its substance in 
your own way, or still better, in three or four dif- 
ferent ways, taking care to preserve the precise mean- 
ing of the original, and to omit nothing. At first 
this will be done awkwardly, but after a little practice 
you will find it easy to say the same thing in half a 
dozen different ways, and when you can do this the 
flexibility of the language in your hands will be 
greatly increased. When you shall find this to be the 
case, follow the plan with longer articles, taking care 
all the time not to make use of awkward, confused, 
or very complex sentences. Remember that of two 
ways of expressing precisely the same thing, the sim- 
pler one is always the better. 

Just here, let me give a word of caution. If the 
student has read any of the books upon English com- 
position, he is in danger of falling into troublesome 
errors by too strict an adherence to the rules they lay 
down. Let him bear in mind, constantly, that these 
rules are only general ones, and are not applicable in 
every case. They are framed, for the most part, for the 
correction of those errors into which very young writers 
commonly fall, and while they are necessary for this 
purpose, even their authors do not intend that they 
should have a wider application than this. 

Let me illustrate this. One of these rules is to the 



COMMON SCHOOL STUDIES. 39 

effect that tautological expressions are bad, and in a gen- 
eral way this is very true ; but there are cases in which 
the frequent repetition of the same word or the same 
idea greatly adds to the force of writing, and a strict ap- 
plication of the rule in such cases as these, is of course 
not intended. Again, there is a very simple rule, that 
where several substantives are coupled toge ther, either 
as the subject or the object of the verb, the conjunction 
" and " or " or " must be used only between the last two. 
For example, " Men, women, children, horses and dogs, 
joined in the chase," is better than " Men and women 
and children" etc., and ordinarily the rule holds good in 
this way. There are times, however, when it is better 
to write all the conjunctions, and our very best writers 
frequently do so. 

To decide when it is better to adhere to these and 
similar rules, and when it is better to depart from them, 
is the office of taste, and good taste in literary matters 
comes only from careful culture. I' can give the stu- 
dent no clue to the problem — no formula by which he 
can solve it, but I have given this caution in order 
that the reader who begins with a proper respect for 
rule may also cultivate, from the first, a reasonable in- 
dependence of rule, in order that the guides given 
him in his text-books may not become his - prison- 
keepers, as they are very apt to do with students who 
have no other masters. What I would press upon him 
is briefly this, that the rules given him in the text- 
books on composition and rhetoric are in the main 
correct, but that not one of them is applicable always 
and everywhere; In avoiding the errors they are de- 
signed to correct, beware of falling into errors of an 
opposite kind. Let your taste and your judgment be 



40 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUESELF. 

educated by these rules, but never allow either to be 
arbitrarily controlled by thern. Apply the rules when 
they are applicable, but hold yourself free to depart 
from their strict letter whenever it carries a meaning 
contrary to their spirit. They are meant to be guide- 
boards, and not impassable barriers to the student. 
He should catch their spirit, taking care to ascertain 
just what they are intended to teach, and just what 
errors they are designed to prevent, keeping constantly 
in mind the fact that except in the matter of gram- 
matical accuracy, there can be no rule of universal ap- 
plication on the subject of English composition. I 
have found no greater stumbling-block in the way of 
self-teaching students than the habit of blindly follow- 
ing rules that were never meant to be so followed. 

There is another exercise in English composition 
which helps to give the student freedom in the use of 
language, while its practice teaches him something else 
at the same time. It is to read brief editorial com- 
ments on current events, and to write something quite 
different upon the same subjects and from the same 
facts. This is what is known in newspaper offices as 
paragraphing, and every editor knows how very few 
people do it thoroughly well. While it forms an excel- 
lent exercise in the use of English, it serves at the same 
time to sharpen the wits and to cultivate a habit of in- 
dependent thinking which is absolutely essential to all 
profitable reading. The man who reads books as gos- 
pels, accepting their statements of fact and their con- 
clusions as necessarily true, becomes the mere creature 
of his books, and his ideas are but reflections, and often 
faint ones at that, of other people's thoughts. He has 
his opinions at second-hand, and they are worth little 



COMMON SCHOOL STUDIES. 41 

to himself and still less to anybody else. His mind is a 
lumber-room. He has succeeded in getting some learn- 
ing, perhaps, but it has brought with it no culture. 
Against a habit with tendencies of this kind we cannot 
take too many precautions, and the exercise just sug- 
gested furnishes a most admirable training in habits of 
reading the very opposite of the unfortunately common 
one to which I refer. 

But as a means of culture in English, the constant 
reading of good authors is more effective than anything 
else, and upon that, chiefly, the student must depend 
for excellence in this as in a good many other depart- 
ments of learning and culture. 

A rather remarkable case, illustrating the effective- 
ness of reading as a teacher of English, was that of 
George Northrup,- the trapper. His education was ex- 
tremely limited ; his opportunities for intercourse with 
men of culture were very few, and his habits of life as 
a trapper were certainly not of a kind to supply educa- 
tional defects. But he was a constant reader of De 
Quincey, Irving, and Bancroft, and when he wrote news- 
paj)er letters from the Indian wars, the purity and 
grace of his literary style were the wonder of every- 
body who knew the history of the man. 



CHAPTER III. 

COLLEGIATE STUDIES. 

WHAT TO STUDY. 

In planning this volume I have had the one purpose 
of making it as generally useful as possible, constantly 
in view. To this end I make my chapters and other 
subdivisions with reference rather to the convenience of 
students than to any strictly philosophical system of 
classification. I have called the branches already treat- 
ed, Common School Studies, not because they are fully 
taught in the average common school, but because they 
ought to be. In like manner I include under the title 
" Collegiate Studies " all that we learn of languages, 
the higher mathematics, and experimental science, al- 
though the rudiments of all these are 'commonly 
learned before matriculation. This manual is intended 
chiefly for students who have not the advantages of re- 
gular instruction, and very many of these are forced by 
circumstances to content themselves with the bare ne- 
cessaries of education. For such the course already 
marked out is especially designed. It embraces "noth- 
ing that the commonest education should not include, 
while it excludes everything else. Having gone thu.: 
far in the work of self-culture, the student will now be 



COLLEGIATE STUDIES. 43 

called upon to decide how much, more of regular study 
he will undertake, and the old questions, " what shall I 
study?" and "how shall I study it ?" will come up again 
for decision. 

In this case, as in the former one, the decision of the 
question, " What shall I study ?" will depend largely 
upon the student's age, circumstances and purposes. 
Again he is reminded that in all knowledge there is 
profit, but that all knowledge is not equally profitable. 
Again he must remember that there is no limit to pro- 
fitable education ; that the ideal education is a com- 
plete storing of the mind with information, and a com- 
plete development of all the faculties ; that the true 
purpose of education is the preparation of the man for 
his most perfect work. 

Study is the means by which education is secured, 
and study has a twofold purpose. Whether we study 
books, men or things, we are constantly accomplishing 
a double end and receiving a double benefit ; we are 
acquiring information and we are developing and dis- 
ciplining our faculties. In deciding between two 
courses of study, which to select, the student must 
take into the account the value of the information 
each will give and the value of the culture each will 
bring. And these values, as I have before said, 
vary according to the circumstances and purposes of 
the student. Some kinds of information and some 
kinds of culture have a special value in certain busi- 
nesses, which other culture and other information, 
equally good in themselves, have not. In other words, 
the man should be moulded to his work in life as per- 
fectly as possible. The more complete his education 
can bemade the better, but if it must be a partial one, 



44 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

then it should embrace the parts that best supply his 
wants. I can only indicate the nature of each branch 
of study, leaving the student to decide which will best 
serve his purpose, reminding him, however, that he 
needs them all, and advising him to make the list of his 
selections as large as his circumstances will allow. 

THE SCIENTISTS AND THE CLASSICISTS. 

The student who has pushed his education to this 
point, cannot have failed to discover that there are two 
opposing schools of educational theorists, differing 
widely in opinion as to the comparative merits of the two 
curriculi — the classical . and the scientific as they are 
called. The more conservative school holds that the 
study of languages brings with it an intellectual culture 
which nothing else can supply. Their opponents argue 
that there is nothing, or at any rate very little of 
practical use, learned from Latin and Greek, and that 
scientific studies furnish as much mental discipline as 
the classics do, while their teachings are eminently 
practical, after the modern acceptation of the term. 
The classicists accuse the scientists of measuring the 
value of culture by a sordid utilitarian standard, and 
the scientists retort by crying " cant," and insisting that 
the old system of " Latin and Logic " is a musty relic 
of a less practical age than this. 

Between these two it is neither the province nor the 
purpose of this volume to decide. Probably both are 
partly right and both partly wrong. The utilitarian 
character of a scientific education is certainly a point 
in its favor, but there seems to be quite as much of 
cant employed in its advocacy as in that of the older 
system. On the other hand, I am not of those who 



COLLEGIATE STUDIES. 45 

think lightly of the classics. The culture obtained in 
study of the languages, whether dead or alive, is of a 
kind which nothing else can claim to give, while the 
practical use of such study, even if we confine it to the 
dead tongues, and measure its value by the strictest 
of utilitarian rules, is by no means small. 

Aside from other considerations, there is no bet- 
ter or surer way of learning English thoroughly than 
by learning other languages. The kinship of all the 
Indo-European tongues is so close that we cannot 
add an acquaintance with any one of them without 
greatly increasing and improving our knowledge of 
those we may have learned already ; and in addition 
to this there can be no question of the fact that the 
act of translating from any one tongue into any 
other, is the very best possible exercise for develop- 
ing that fluency, and freedom, and flexibility in the use 
of our own language which we all admit are of so 
much value. 

In the exercises given in a former chapter, for the 
student's use, I have purposely omitted this one of 
translation, because it seemed out of place there, inas- 
much as a large majority of those for whose benefit 
that chapter was written know no language but their 
own, and many of them, perhaps, will study no other. 
Some of those exercises, however, are one in principle 
with translation, and the processes are, in fact, transla- 
tions from one kind of English into another. These 
have been made so for the purpose of supplying to the 
student of English, as far as possible, the advantages 
which only the student of other languages can fully en- 
joy, and the man who would master English, if he can- 
not study other languages thoroughly, cannot do a bet- 



46 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

ter thing than to learn something of other tongues* 
even if it be but the " little Latin and less Greek " at- 
tributed to Shakespeare. The very fact that to learn 
anything of these he must translate their idiom into 
our own, is quite enough to justify the recommenda- 
tion. 

I need not dwell upon the advantages of scientific 
studies. The student will hear these extolled on all 
hands, and with excellent reason. The sciences deal 
with the practical concerns of to-day. Their teachings 
are all of the largest usefulness. Their study equips 
the student, as nothing else can, for an active, useful, 
earnest, and profitable life, and anything like a mastery 
even of any one scientific specialty brings with it a good 
degree of culture, though the culture is of a somewhat 
narrow sort in most instances. Indeed, the chief 
clanger incident to scientific pursuits lies in the growing 
tendency of scientists to follow specialties, to the ex- 
clusion of everything else. Humboldt took " all know- 
ledge for his province," but in our day no man can hope 
to be great in the whole even of any one science. Your 
botanist, who wishes to be something more than an 
amateur, confines himself chiefly to some one class of 
flora. One astronomer studies asteroids, and another 
makes comets his specialty, until even the fixed stars 
become, in his view T , affairs of minor importance ; 
while the entomologist thinks meanly of any glass that 
has a greater range than that of his microscope. 

There is so much in science — so much in each separate 
science — that no one man can grasp it all with a master 
hand, and as a consequence the tendency is more and 
more strongly toward specialties. All this, of course, is 
for the good of science, but it must greatly narrow the 



COLLEGIATE STUDIES. 47 

men. It is a departure, of the most marked character, 
from the ideal education — the education which enlarges 
and develops all the faculties into their fullest and 
most healthful activity, giving each its full share of 
culture, and subordinating each to the perfectly bal- 
anced whole. It is well for the world that we have 
specialists, but the pushing of one's whole being into a 
specialty, while it may ensure good results in that one 
direction, is not, by any means, the highest or best form 
of education. 

The advantages of mathematical study are manifest. 
Aside from the practical daily uses of mathematics in 
every workshop and every office, the study of pure or 
applied mathematics supplies a kind of intellectual 
training which can be secured in no other way. The 
accuracy of conception and statement required, the 
mastery of principles, the solution of problems — all 
these develop habits of mind of the most healthful 
and useful kind. There is hardly any business in which 
the processes of mathematics are not in constant use, 
and there can be no position in life in which the mental 
discipline that comes of mathematical study is value- 
less. 

THE QUESTION TO BE DECIDED. 

The student who has completed his common school 
studies will in almost every case feel called upon to de- 
cide what he will select from the seemingly endless list 
presented by the advocates of the classical and the scien- 
tific courses. On the one hand there are a score of 
separate sciences, almost any one of which is too vast 
for his complete mastery, and on the other a list of 



48 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

languages still larger. From which shall he select, and 
how much of either may he safely undertake ? 

Again, he must decide for himself, having in mind 
his own special circumstances, the time at his command, 
his wants in the way of information, and his wants in 
the way of culture. A careful reading of this chapter 
will inform him as to the nature of the several branches, 
and their respective degrees of special adaptation to his 
purposes, but he should never for a moment lose sight 
of the fact that the more general and catholic his edu- 
cation can be made, the nearer it will approach to the 
perfect standard of complete and well balanced cul- 
ture. If his time is limited, and his business or other 
circumstances create a special want, let him supply that 
first, by all means. Otherwise let him beware of the 
narrowness of specialties. Except in such individual 
cases as the one named, the best course is one embrac- 
ing something of the languages, something of the ex- 
perimental sciences, and something of mathematics — 
and the more of each the better.* 



* I speak here only of text-book study. The subject of general literature 
vail be treated under another head. 



CHAPTEE IV. 

THE STUDY OF LANGUAGES. 

Having determined to study one or more foreign 
tongues, the student will almost certainly find himself 
puzzled to decide what ones they shall be. I cannot 
tell him, nor can any one else lay down a general rule 
in such cases. Perhaps I can help the reader, however, 
to solve the difficulty for himself. 

THE COMPAEATIVE VALUES OF LANGUAGES. 

The Greek and Latin commonly take precedence of 
modern languages, in systematic curriculi, for the rea- 
son that they are much more difficult in some regards, 
and are therefore supposed to furnish a larger share of 
mental discipline than any two spoken European lan- 
guages. Again, our literature, and that of all Europe, 
is so closely allied to the classics of Greece and Rome 
as to give special value to the study of those tongues. 
On the other hand, a knowledge of almost any modern 
speech is of much greater practical usefulness than a 
knowledge of Greek or Latin, and the current of opin- 
ion seems to be setting strongly in favor of modern 
"languages, in this utilitarian age. 

Of the modern languages, French is the most gener- 
ally useful, perhaps, to people who may have occasion to 



50 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

travel, inasmuch as it is not only the language of diplo- 
macy, but also the one speech in which the traveller 
can make himself understood almost anywhere in Eu- 
rope. The French literature, too, is one of the finest in 
the world. 

The German, while it is spoken less commonly out of 
Germany, is the native tongue of a very large part of 
Europe. It is so closely akin to the Saxon part of our 
own language as to have a peculiar value to English- 
speaking people. And, moreover, there are so many 
Germans in our own country that a knowledge of their 
language has a practical value to Americans which no 
other has. 

These are the two modern languages most commonly 
studied by Americans, for the reason that while their 
respective literatures are of the very highest order, they 
have a greater practical value to us than other Euro- 
pean tongues. In point of kinship with English the 
Germanic family of languages (German, Dutch, Scan- 
dinavian, etc.) are nearer on one side, and the Latin 
group (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.) on 
the other. Most of our shorter, commoner conversation- 
al words come to us from the Germanic side, while from 
the Latin we have the words of nice distinction and 
more ornate speech. From the one we get the strength 
and from the other the polish of our tongue. The re- 
quirements of the student in one or the other of these 
regards may influence his choice to some extent, where 
other considerations are equal. 

THE COMPAEAT1VE DIFFICULTY OF LEAKNING THEM. 

Another point is the comparative ease or difficulty 
with which different languages may be learned. To a 



THE STUDY OF LANGUAGES. 51 

student who knows nothing but English, the difference 
in this respect, between the leading languages of the 
two families, is hardly appreciable. The Dutch closely 
resembles English in some respects, and the Erisic dia- 
lect is so like our own language that travellers have 
sometimes mistaken it for corrupt English. This is not 
the case however with the German. We have a good 
many words in common with that language, but the 
resemblance is not much stronger than that between 
English and the Latin tongues, so that the student who 
knows no language but English will find one about as 
difficult as the other. With one who knows Latin, 
however, even partially, the case is very different. To 
such a person the Erench and the Italian are much 
easier than the German, while the Spanish and Portu- 
guese are easier even than these. Indeed, the Spanish 
is so similar to the Latin that no Latin scholar need 
trouble himself very much to learn to read it 

If the student knows Latin, then, or any one of the 
Latin tongues, he will find far less difficulty in learning 
any other language of that family than in mastering a 
Germanic speech. If he knows any two of these lan- 
guages, his study of the others will be still easier. 

I suggest all these things merely that the student 
may have before him all the facts bearing upon the 
question of what languages he will undertake, and may 
make his decision wisely. 

HOW TO STUDY LANGUAGES. 

Languages are studied in a great variety of ways, 
many of them convenient and many exceedingly awk- 
ward. The old system, still in use in too many schools, 
is to begin with a grammar, study it from beginning to 



52 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

end, and then, with the aid of a lexicon, to translate 
one book after another from the language in hand into 
English. The Germans, who have done more than any 
other people to develop rational S3 r stems of teaching, 
were the originators of the first improvements on this 
old, slow and unsatisfactory mode of studying lan- 
guages, and to them we really owe all that we have of 
improved methods in the matter. Their first marked 
advance was the introduction of what is usually called 
prose composition — which consists of a series of grad- 
uated exercises in translation — from the foreign into 
the mother tongue, and conversely from the native into 
the foreign language. The advantages of this plan of 
graduated double translations over the old system are 
so manifest that the principle involved has found a 
place in almost every one of the later methods, most of 
which have grown out of it more or less directly. 

THE GROUP SYSTEM. 

Dr. Beard, in his work on self-culture, predicts that 
the discoveries made by the comparative philologists 
will revolutionize our system of learning languages. 
He thinks the best way to become familiar with differ- 
ent tongues is to study them collectively, and suggests 
that the student first take up Sanscrit, as the head of 
the Indo-European family, and learn at least those of 
its roots which have been preserved in the tongues that 
have come after it, and then proceed to learn the com- 
parative grammar of the several languages composing 
one of the groups of which the great Indo-European 
family is composed. 

However admirable this plan may be for men who in- 
tend to make comparative philologists of themselves, it 



THE STUDY OF LANGUAGES. 53 

will hardly become, as Dr. Beard thinks, the common 
mode of studying languages, and it certainly has little 
practical value to the class of students for whom I 
write. I refer to it here only because it contains the 
germ of a suggestion which may be of advantage to the 
student, and that is that if he intends to study more 
than one language, he will get on faster by studying 
them in groups, not necessarily beginning with Latin 
when he means to study that and the tongues which 
have come from it, but studying all the Latin lan- 
guages he intends to master, one after the other, defer- 
ring those of any other group until after he shall have 
completed his studies in those of the group first under- 
taken. In this way one language will become a key to 
another, and the student's progress will be greatly faci- 
litated. 

Ordinarily, however, the number of tongues studied 
is not sufficient to make this of any practical use, and 
it will better serve the purposes of this volume to tell 
the student just how to learn any one language. Sev- 
eral improved plans for doing this have been devised of 
late years, all of them based upon the German system 
already referred to, though in them all that system is 
greatly elaborated and improved. 

m. marcel's system. 

The best of these, in my judgment, is that given in a 
little book now out of print,* of which I shall endeavor 
to give the spirit here. In the book itself the reasons 
for every process and every exercise are given in full, a 
thing manifestly impossible here, even if it were desira- 

* The Study of Languages brought back to its True Principles ; or the Art of 
Thinking in a Foreign Language, by C Marcel, Knt. Leg. Hon., etc., etc. 



54 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUKSELF. 

ble. The student needs only to know what the system 
is, and that it has proved one of the very best in actual 
practice. With this general acknowledgment let me 
give the system of M. Marcel, with one or two unim- 
portant modifications, as briefly as possible. 

In learning a language there are four distinct things 
to be learned. These are — 

1. To read the written tongue ; 

2. To understand the spoken tongue ; 

3. To speak the language ; 

4. To write the language. 

And these should be learned in the order in which 
they are here set down, so that one may serve as a key 
to another. Not that one of these should be, or can be 
wholly mastered before the next is begun, but this is 
the order in which they should be taken up. In 
learning a dead language, the first and last of these 
are all that it is necessary to know, because the pronun- 
ciation of the dead languages is uncertain at best, and 
as nobody speaks them we have no occasion to learn a 
questionable pronunciation, which when learned is of 
no use whatever. 

Beyond the quantitive rules of pronunciation there- 
fore there is little to be learned in this respect in the 
study of dead languages, and the same thing is true 
also of modem languages, when the student studies 
them solely with a view to the reading of their litera- 
ture, and has no purpose to speak or to understand 
them when spoken. 

HOW TO LEAKN TO READ A LANGUAGE. 

The ordinary way of learning to read a language is 
by the constant use of the grammar and the dictionary. 






THE STUDY OF LANGUAGES. 55 

In the method now under consideration both of these 
are dispensed with almost wholly. "We not only do not 
find it necessary to learn the rules of English syntax 
before learning to read English, but practically we learn 
those rules chiefly from our reading, precisely as the 
grammarians who have written them down for us 
learned them in the first instance. A language is not 
made from its syntax, but the syntax is deduced from 
the language — it is merely a statement of the facts of 
usage, and is in no way the author of that usage. Ac- 
cordingly, to learn the rules of syntax which come 
from the language, before learning the language, is 
wholly unnatural and irrational. The child learns how 
to put words together before he learns anything of the 
syntactical rules involved. He learns to use his mother 
tongue from the example of others, and not from any 
rules of syntax, and it is precisely in this way that the 
student should proceed in learning any other language. 
He should learn first the usage of the people who 
write and speak it, and from this he will learn the 
rules practically without the aid of any grammar. 

And the same is true of verbal meanings. Diction- 
aries only give the translation of words — their equiva- 
lents in English — not their meaning in all its fullness, 
which can only be learned from their use by the peo- 
ple to whom they are natives. 

The student cannot learn the grammar of a lan- 
guage or the meaning of its words at all adequately 
except from the language itself, and to attempt to 
learn these as a step preparatory to the study of the 
language is simply an attempt to subvert the order of 
nature and to accomplish an impossibility. 

There are certain things, however, that may be 



56 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

learned from the grammars and dictionaries as a pre- 
paration for reading, and the learning of these consti- 
tutes the first step in the study of the language. Let 
me explain what these are, and briefly state the reasons 
for learning them and only them. There are two 
classes of words of which every language is almost wholly 
composed. The first of these consists of verbs, adjec- 
tives and substantives, out of which, chiefly, all sen- 
tences are formed. The other class consists of articles, 
pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and adverbs, 
which are used to connect the others or to modify their 
meaning. 

The import of words of the first class varies largely 
in practice, so that it can only be adequately learned 
from their use, while words of the other class have or- 
dinarily but a single signification, which may be readily 
learned ; and moreover, as a rule they have few if any 
variations of form in composition. 

These words of the second class should be so far 
learned in advance that the student will know them by 
sight when he shall meet them in reading. There are 
less than four hundred of them in common use in each 
European language, and their limited number, together 
with their usually uninflected character, makes it easy 
to learn their forms and meanings so that when they 
are met they will give no trouble. 

With words of the first class, however, no attempt 
should be made to do anything, of the kind, but the 
conjugations and declensions should be mastered, so 
that the various forms of inflected words may be readi- 
ly recognized. This much may be learned from any 
grammar, and this constitutes the whole of the first 
step in learning to read a language. 






THE STUDY OF LANGUAGES. 57 

The pupil should next begin to translate the foreign 
tongue into his own language, without the use of dic- 
tionary or grammar. When he knows the inflections 
of the verbs, etc., and can recognize most of the words 
of the second class, he will have no difficulty in trans- 
lating any plain text into English, with the help of a 
strict translation, and for this purpose it is best at first 
to use text-books in which the English and the foreign 
text are printed in parallel columns, or on directly op- 
posite pages. 

Books of this kind may be had for nearly all the mo- 
dern languages usually studied in this country ; but 
when they cannot be secured, the next best thing is a 
translation in a separate volume. Interlinear transla- 
tions are very perplexing, and are bad for several other 
reasons. 

The books used should be as interesting as possible 
in their matter, and stories or other works in narrative 
style are much the best. Poetry should be avoided en- 
tirely at this stage of the learner's progress, because it 
is difficult, and because its syntactical structure is not 
in accordance with the common usage of the tongue: 

The student now proceeds to translate the foreign 
language into English, referring to his printed transla- 
tion for assistance, for confirmation in cases of doubt, 
and for the correction of errors. In the text he has 
the language in actual use, written by an author to 
whom it is a mother tongue, and consequently, showing 
all the usages and idioms of the language much more 
fully and much more practically than can be done in 
any ordinary text-book. 

What he wants is to learn French, or German, or 
Spanish just as Frenchmen, Germans or Spaniards 



58 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

really use it, and this is best learned from a study of it 
as they habitually employ it. He wants no grammatical 
disquisition on the subject, and no dictionary transla- 
tions of words. 

He needs to read as much as possible of the lan- 
guage he is studying, and by thus reading it he finds 
out practically what are the usages of the language 
and what the real force and meaning of each word is, 
and this is just what the grammars and the dictionaries 
theoretically teach, but what they can never teach 
thoroughly and practically. 

But just here it is necessary to remind the student 
that translating a book from a foreign language into 
English is not reading the foreign language by any 
means. There is much that is untranslatable in every 
language. The full force of an author's meaning can 
never be felt except by those who read his work in the 
original — that is to say by those who have so far mas- 
tered the language in which he writes, that his words 
and sentences directly convey his meaning, without 
their mental translation into English. 

We never know a language, we can never really read 
a language, until we can think in it, without mentally 
substituting the native for the foreign idiom, or vice 
versa. 

I mention this here, because it should be the con- 
stant aim of the student, as he translates, to acquire 
the power of understanding the text without translat- 
ing it. This power comes only with effort, and the ef- 
fort should be a constant one, beginning almost as soon 
as the student begins to translate. 

His first success in this direction will be in the way 
of isolated, idiomatic expressions, which cannot be ex- 



THE STTDr OF LANGUAGES. 59 

actly translated. Of these he will soon catch the spirit 
and meaning, at first partially and imperfectly, after 
awhile in all their f ullness. Let him seize every such 
opportunit}^, and when once an expression carries its 
meaning to his mind directly, let him always after 
avoid the translation of that or similar expressions. 

His stock of such will grow much more rapidly than 
he thinks, and each new acquisition will aid him in se - 
curing others. 

Here is another advantage which this system has 
over the old one. Grammars and dictionaries teach 
men to translate only ; by this system we learn to read 
in the original. 

No grammar can tell the student what an idiomatic 
expression means. It can only tell him what is the 
English idiom most nearly corresponding with it. 

Children learn their own language by precisely this 
method. No parent lectures his child upon the rela- 
tions of substantive and verb, before teaching him how 
to put them together in a sentence. We learn our 
mother tongue in sentences, and not in words. Even 
before the child can pronounce at all, he learns to un- 
derstand what his mother means when she says things 
to him. 

His knowledge of whole sentences precedes his 
knowledge of words. He can talk and read for many 
years before he knows anything of syntax, and if he 
heard nothing but pure, correct English from the first 
he would use nothing else. 

Now it is precisely this system which we should fol- 
low in learning any foreign language. We should learn 
not the definitions of isolated words, and the rules of 
syntax regarding them, but the meaning of the senten- 



60 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

ces as they are framed by the people whose language 
we are studying, and thus learn the language itself. 
After we shall have done this thoroughly, it will be 
time enough to take up the grammar, if we shall then 
care to do it. 

Let the student begin then by translating some in- 
teresting work, substituting actual reading for transla- 
tion wherever it is possible, and becoming familiar with 
the usages of the language as rapidly as he can. He 
will find a second reading of all the passages of very 
great advantage in this direction, or still better, if he 
can get for his first reading-book, something with 
which he is already familar in English— the New Testa- 
ment, for instance — he will much more rapidly gain a 
clear insight into the untranslatable force of the idiom, 
and acquire much sooner than he otherwise would, the 
power to think hi the language he is learning. 

At this stage of the learner's progress, if the lan- 
guage he is studying be a living one, he should make 
no attempt to pronounce it. The power of under- 
standing the spoken tongue, as will be seen later, must 
come before that of pronouncing it, and any attempts 
at pronunciation made before this power of under- 
standing is acquired, will only cultivate and fix bad ha- 
bits upon the organs of speech employed, and debauch 
the ear so as to interfere seriously with the ultimate 
acquisition of a good pronunciation. 

At present the student should avoid pronunciation 
altogether, if possible, letting his eye alone know the 
words, without attaching to them any idea of sound 
whatever. 

Many people find it impossible to do this, but they 
may at least avoid the actual pronouncing of the words 



THE STUDY OF LANGUAGES. 61 

so that their bad pronunciation may be mental only, 
and not fix itself upon the organs of speech. 

M. Marcel thinks it would be better for the student 
who must attach some idea of sound to the printed 
words, to let that idea be precisely what it would be 
were the same combinations of letters to occur in Eng- 
lish, so that when he shall come to learn the pronunci- 
ation correctly, he may not be embarrassed by the ne- 
cessity of correcting approximate but erroneous ideas 
previously conceived. 

The student should continue his translating as rapid- 
ly as practicable. What he wants is to become familiar 
with the words and phrases of the language in actual 
use, and the more he reads the oftener will each of 
these present itself. 

Bepetition is the mother of memory, in the matter of 
language. The student learns and remembers the ex- 
act force of an expression only from its repeated ap- 
pearance in the text, and the more pages he shall read, 
the more frequently each word and phrase will occur, 
and the more he will learn of the language. 

At first, of course, he will find a few words whose 
meaning he cannot discern even by the light of his En- 
glish translation. For these, and for these only he 
should consult his dictionary, remembering that it is 
better always to learn the meaning of a word from its 
use, when that is possible, than from the verbal transla- 
tion of a dictionary. For a while it will be necessary 
to go over every passage two or three times, in order 
that its full meaning may become clear, and its phrases 
be fixed in the memory. After a while this will cease 
to be necessary. 

As the student goes on he will rapidly learn the 



62 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

meanings and the uses of words and of idiomatic ex- 
pressions. As this knowledge comes to him he must 
gradually become independent of his English transla- 
tion, and learn to rely upon his own increasing know- 
ledge of the language. Beginning with the two texts 
in parallel columns, his second or third book should be 
wholly in the original, and his translation in a separate 
volume, so that he may only refer to it as occasion shall 
require. 

When he can dispense with the translation except for 
very difficult sentences, it will be well to use books with 
marginal or foot-notes in which the very difficult pas- 
sages only are rendered, and to substitute for his 
French-English or German-English dictionary, as the 
case may be, one written wholly in the language he is 
learning, in which definitions in that language take the 
place of translations into English. 

But it cannot be too strongly impressed upon the stu- 
dent that we learn the true, exact and perfect meanings 
of words only by induction after seeing them used in a 
variety of ways. We may commit definitions to mem- 
ory, but we get at the true meaning of words only from 
their actual use. This is true to a great extent of our 
own language, and still more largely of a foreign one. 
When we first meet a word in a sentence we gain an 
imperfect idea of its meaning, or we learn one side of 
its meaning. When it occurs in other relations we 
grasp it more perfectly, and after we have seen it used 
a number of times we learn it in all its fullness, and 
henceforth know all its purpose and power. 

This inductive process is the basis of the system now 
under consideration, and to cultivate the habit of in- 
duction the learner must work out for himself the 



THE STUDY OF LANGUAGES. 63 

meaning of each word in his text, as far as possible 
without having recourse to his dictionary. 

When the student finds translating without the use 
of a printed translation thoroughly easy, which is to 
say, when he shall have learned the use and meaning of 
most of the words and phrases of the language in hand 
so that he can readily render the text into its English 
equivalent, he should set himself earnestly to the work 
of learning to read in that language without translat- 
ing it at all, as before explained. 

If he has taken care to practice this with single 
phrases as he has gone on, the purpose will now be 
much more easily accomplished than it otherwise 
would have been. He should begin it with the book 
last translated, because his familarity with the text will 
greatly facilitate his work. At first he will find it a 
little difficult, perhaps, to grasp the meaning from the 
text without the mental act of translation, but a very 
little practice will enable him to do this, and by con- 
stantly reading in this way, he will gradually learn to 
think in the language, so that he can mentally or in 
writing frame his thoughts into the forms of the tongue 
he is learning without first conceiving them in Eng- 
lish. 

When he can do this readily, he will be able to ap- 
preciate the literature of that language, and to read it 
with a full measure of profit, which he never can do so 
long as he mentally translates it into his own native 
idiom. 

THE TIME NECESSARY. 

With a vast number of students this is all that i: 
wanted of foreign languages. They wish to read an. I 






64 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUBSELF. 

profit by the literature of other nations, and have no 
especial need or desire to know the spoken tongue. 
They stop when their purpose is accomplished, and if 
this be the limit of their purpose, they will naturally 
want to know how long it will take them to reach it. 

To such a question no answer of universal applica- 
tion can be given. The time will vary considerably by 
reason of differences of mental habit and differing de- 
grees of application and of daily leisure. Bat a rea- 
sonably apt pupil, who can give two or three hours a 
day to his work, and who works earnestly, should be 
able to master this much of any modern European 
language within six months. 

M. Marcel thinks that length of time should suffice 
for this and considerably more, but his estimate is pro- 
bably based upon his own experience when he gave his 
whole time and attention to the matter in hand, which 
few students of course can do. 

The dead languages are learned somewhat less rapid- 
ly than the spoken ones, but they may be learned, as 
this much of modern languages may, without any as- 
sistance from teachers. Here, as everywhere else, a 
competent teacher will greatly assist the student, of 
course, but this much of language the student, with or 
without a teacher, must really learn for himself, and 
there is no reason why the want of an instructor should 
deter any earnest student from undertaking to so far 
master a language as to read it, to write it, and to 
think in it. 

LEARNING TO UNDERSTAND THE SPOKEN TONGUE. 

Every young child hears the conversations around it, 
and after a while it begins to understand what is said. 



THE STUDY OF LANGUAGES. 65 

At first every rspoken sentence falls on its ear in a con- 
fused jumble of sound, which not only means nothing } 
but is so confused that the child cannot even separate 
the words from each other, or determine just what 
sounds are really uttered. Little by little, however, as 
the same sounds are repeated again and again in its 
presence, it begins to distinguish them from each other 
with a constantly increasing accuracy, until it learns at 
last what certain sets of these sounds mean. After this 
comes its first effort to pronounce the words it has 
heard. 

The order of the process is understanding first, 
speaking afterwards, and it is precisely in this order 
that we should put them in learning any foreign 
tongue. Our organs of speech are exactly like those 
of Frenchmen, or Germans, or Spaniards, and there is 
no word in their languages which we may not learn to 
pronounce quite as well as they. But the difference in 
the pronunciation of a native and a foreigner in any 
language, lies chiefly in the niceties of sound, and it 
arises almost wholly from the fact that the foreign ear 
has not been educated into the power of distinguishing 
these niceties of sound in a language other than its 
own. 

At first every foreign language is a confused jumble 
to our ears, just as all language is to the child, and we 
must learn to hear it understandingly, just as the child 
learns to hear his mother tongue. When French is 
spoken in our presence, if we know no French, it is 
impossible for us to separate the words from each other, 
and more than this, we cannot accurately repeat after 
the speakers the shortest of phrases, giving the sounds 
as they give them. 



66 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

To our ears our imitation is exact, but to the French- 
man it is painfully wide of the mark. I once knew a 
French gentleman who said that he lived in this country 
and spoke English for ten years before he was able to 
discover the slightest difference in sound between the 
words " tree " and " three," even when they were utter- 
ed with the utmost care for the purpose of making the 
distinction clear to him. In other words, it took ten 
years of culture to enable his ear to discover a difference 
of sound so marked as this. 

This much by way of illustration on a point which 
cannot be too strongly insisted upon, though it is one 
which both teachers and pupils often overlook, — to wit 
that the education of the ear should come before that 
of the tongue, — that we must learn to catch and under- 
stand the sounds of the language before we can learn to 
utter them, and that to attempt the latter before attend- 
ing to the -former can only result in bad vocal habits 
difficult to overcome. 

It is for these reasons that we divide this part of the 
student's work into two separate tasks, — learning to un- 
derstand the spoken tongue, and learning to speak it. 

In ordinary practice the distinction is made loosely 
when it is made at all, and a great many teachers begin 
teaching the pronunciation at the outset, even before the 
student has begun to translate. 

To some extent the four parts into which the task of 
learning a language is divided, overlap each other, of 
course, and they neither can nor should be wholly sepa- 
rated, but it is in every way best that the student shall 
take them up in the order here given, letting them 
run into each other where they do so naturally, but 



THE STUDY OF LANGUAGES. 67 

treating them, in the main, as separate parts of the work 
he has undertaken. 

We have already seen that before we can learn to 
speak a language properly we must so educate our ear 
as to distinguish its sounds nicely, whether they be ut- 
tered separately in syllables, or combined into words 
and sentences. We must learn to hear the language 
before we can learn to speak it, and this can be learned 
only through the ear. 

Books do not address themselves to the ear, and 
therefore books can never teach us either to hear or to 
speak. For this, and for this only in the study of 
language, a teacher is absolutely necessary. The stu- 
dent cannot learn it by himself, and no book can assist 
him. He must have a teacher, but any person native to 
the tongue, who can read it, will do for a teacher, if he 
be instructed a little in the art of teaching what he 
knows, and hence I give here some suggestions as to 
how the ear and the tongue can best be trained, so that 
in the absence of a competent teacher the student may 
be able to make use of any person who speaks the lan- 
guage as a mother tongue, himself instructing his teach- 
er how to proceed. A very small expenditure for the 
services of some such person will thus cover the whole 
cost of learning the language. 

It matters little, in this case, whether the teacher un- 
derstands English or not. All that is required of him 
is a correct pronunciation of his own language. 

The teacher should begin with a book which the stu- 
dent has recently read, one with which he is thoroughly 
familiar. At first he should pronounce slowly and dis- 
tinctly the words of the book, while the student listens, 
with the text before him. A phrase at a time carefulh? 



68 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF 

uttered, and as nearly as possible with the conversation- 
al accent, will soon enable the student to follow without 
looking at the text, if it be a familiar one, and as soon 
as this can be done at all the use of the eye should be 
dispensed with, so that the unassisted ear may be 
brought into full activity. 

When any sound is not accurately caught by the stu- 
dent, or when it does not carry its full meaning with it, 
he should stop his teacher and have the words spoken 
again and again until their sound and their sense are 
perfectly clear. When exercises of this sort become 
easy, the teacher must read whole sentences at once 
without dividing them into their clauses, and as soon 
as the student can follow him in them he should begin 
to increase the rapidity of his reading, taking care that 
the increase each day is so slight that the student does 
not lose either the sound or the sense of what is 
read. 

When the student's proficiency is such that he can 
readily comprehend a familiar text, read rapidly, one 
less familiar should be substituted, and a very few 
weeks of diligent application will so train the learner's 
ear that he will have no difficulty in understanding any 
book read aloud in the language in hand. 

It will now be time for him to begin his efforts at 
pronunciation. To make earlier attempts is not only 
useless, but positively injurious. The uneducated ear 
imperfectly catches the foreign accent, and the tongue 
as imperfectly utters it. A bad habit of ear is con- 
firmed and a bad habit of tongue is created. But when 
the ear clearly catches the sounds of the language, so 
that the sound is unmistakable in itself, and carries its 
meaning with it, the tongue will be easily trained to the 



THE STUDY OF LANGUAGES. 69 

pow.er of reproducing it, and the well-schooled ear will 
readily detect and rapidly cure the imperfections of the 
tongue's performances. 

This postponement of the first efforts at pronuncia- 
tion until after the ear has learned the language, will 
not only greatly facilitate the learner's progress, but 
will also make his pronunciation, in the end, much more 
perfect than it otherwise could be. 

As soon as the learner is so far advanced that he can 
readily understand the reading of his teacher, he 
should begin the habit of mentally pronouncing after 
him, as an additional preparation for the task of learn- 
ing to speak the language, and when he can follow ra- 
pidly read prose, he should substitute poetry in its 
stead. As verse is necessarily somewhat involved in 
style, it cannot be translated quite as rapidly as an or- 
dinary reader reads it, and hence it is particularly valu- 
able at this stage of the student's progress, because he 
must understand it in the original, without translation, 
if he understands it at all. 

The teacher should also talk with his pupil only in 
the language he is learning, not only for the sake of 
adding so much to the exercises, but also because in 
his conversation he will pronounce with the natural ac- 
cent, a thing which can never be perfectly done in 
reading. 

The student who has learned to read the language 
easily before beginning this part of his task, should be 
able to understand the spoken tongue after a month or 
six weeks of this kind of practice, and he will then Ids 
prepared to enter upon the next stage of his journey, 
namely — ■ 



70 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 



LEABNING TO SPEAK THE LANGUAGE. 

In learning to pronounce a foreign tongue the one 
tiling to be guarded against is error. It is far easier 
and infinitely better to avoid error than to correct it. 
A word once mispronounced is more difficult to man- 
age afterwards than one that has not been attempted at 
all. 

For this reason it is better not to begin this part of 
the task at all until the ear is pretty well skilled in its 
function, after which the pronunciation is readily and 
correctly mastered. But even when this precaution has 
been taken, the student should attempt no word until 
he is sure that he knows its exact sound, to which end 
the teacher should begin by pronouncing a very short 
phrase two or three times, slowly and distinctly, the 
pupil listening until he is sure that he has mastered it 
with his ear. When this has been done he should take 
it up in his turn, saying it over until it falls from his 
tongue without conscious effort. 

If he pronounces wrong, the teacher must stop him 
and repeat the process from the first. 

After a little time the length of the phrases may be 
increased, gradually, until the pupil can repeat whole 
sentences, slowly at first, — more rapidly afterwards. As 
the teacher reads, the pupil should attend with his ear 
only, not looking at the printed page, but taking the 
words from their articulate rather than their written 
form. That this may be the more perfectly clone, the 
student should wholly abstain from reading aloud until 
his pronunciation is fixed. He should learn the spo- 
ken language wholly through his ear. He may retain 



THE STUDY OF LANGUAGES. 71 

it afterwards by reading aloud, but it cannot be learn- 
ed satisfactorily in that way. 

There are some languages, however, in which the or- 
thography and pronunciation bear a constant and uni- 
form relation to each other— languages in which every 
letter, and every combination of letters, has its fixed and 
certain sound. In these, reading aloud as an auxiliary 
exercise is well enough. In these, too, a very brief 
tutelage will give the student all the sounds of the lan- 
guage, and enable him by reading to perfect his pronun- 
ciation of all the words, without further assistance from 
a master. 

When the student shall have learned to pronounce 
most of the words in common use, he has only to prac- 
tice his art, both by reading and by conversation with 
his teacher, to make himself as nearly perfect in speak- 
ing the language as it is practically possible for English- 
speaking people to become. Should he be surrounded 
by people to whom the language is a mother tongue, he 
will of course talk with them only in their native 
idiom ; but where this is not the case, some care is ne- 
cessary to prevent the gradual loss of the power to 
speak in the acquired idiom. 

Beading aloud without hearers is not a pleasing task, 
and hearers sufficiently proficient to follow the reader 
are not always to be found. To supply this want it is 
well to commit passages from books to memory, and to 
repeat them frequently aloud. In other words, the art 
of pronouncing a foreign language when once acquired 
can only be retained by practicing it, and anything 
which furnishes occasion for practice is useful to this 
end. 

I have thus given the spirit of this much of M. Mar- 



72 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUKSELF. 

eel's system, condensing it as far as it is practical to 
do so, and altering its details wherever I have thought 
a change desirable to adapt it more perfectly to the uses 
of that .class of students for whom chiefly these 
pages are written. In making these alterations of 
detail, however, I have taken care not to depart from 
the principle on which his system is based. 

I omit wholly the remainder of his teachings, — all 
that he says about learning the conversational idiom so 
that the pupil's thoughts will flow in it freely, and 
all of the chapters on the Art of Writing, on Mental 
Culture, and on Koutine. Parts of these have no prac- 
tical value to students without a master, as they refer 
chiefly to the art of teaching rather than to that of 
learning. Other parts are wholly foreign to the pur- 
poses of this volume. 

As to the art of writing a foreign language, I deem it 
unnecessary to say anything, inasmuch as it follows, al- 
most without effort, the art of reading.- Any one who 
can read French, for instance, sufficiently well to appre- 
ciate the text without translating it, can hardly fail to 
write it well, with very little practice. 

THE ROBEKTSONIAN SYSTEM. 

Another very admirable system of learning foreign 
languages is that of Professor Eobertson. In its gen- 
eral design it closely resembles the plan already sketch- 
ed, and in many respects it is but a practical application 
of the principles elaborated in M. Marcel's work, 
though there are some important points of difference 
between the two plans. 

The Kobertsonian text-books are prepared for use in 
schools, and have therefore many things in them, of 



THE STUDY OF LANGUAGES. 73 

which the student without a master cannot make use, 
but omitting these, the books themselves may be used 
with advantage by any class of learners. 

The text consists of a simple story, so ingeniously 
constructed that its telling involves all the idioms of 
the language to be learned, in succession, repeating 
each constantly, so that even in his earliest lessons the 
student becomes familiar with all the peculiarities of 
structure and phraseology, which under the old systems 
of teaching presented the chief difficulties in his path. 
A portion of the text is taken up in each lesson, and 
printed with a slavish, verbal, English translation inter- 
lined. This is followed by a translation into good En- 
glish. Then follow a series of questions and answers, 
and sentences for oral translation, made up exclusively 
of words and phrases from the text, which furnish 
from the first admirable exercises in double translation. 
and also rapidly train the pupil in the art of thinking 
in the language he is learning, and reading it without 
translating. 

This much of each lesson is designed for those who 
wish to learn the language rapidly and practically. 
Appended to each of these lessons is a grammatical dis- 
sertation for the benefit of those who desire to study 
the tongue critically as they go on. 

The system dispenses, as Marcel's does, with the use 
of a dictionary, and the text-books are provided with 
abundant instruction as to the manner of their use, so 
that the student who shall adopt them will need no 
guidance of this sort here. 

On the whole I prefer the system already sketched 
to that of Professor Eobertson, but the two are so 
nearly the same in principle that the student cannot err 



74 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUESELF. 

greatly in selecting either, and whether he shall follow 
the one or the other, his progress will be far more ra- 
pid than it could possibly be on the old grammar and 
dictionary plan. ^ 

Before quitting this subject let me give a word of 
warning to the student — let me remind him that in all 
education, beyond what is necessary to supply the im- 
mediate business wants of the man, culture is of more 
value than learning ; and with this fact before him the 
student will readily understand why I say that one 
language thoroughly mastered is better than a dozen 
half learned. 

If he has taken up French, let him follow that alone, 
to ihe exclusion of all other tongues, until he shall have 
so far mastered its principles as to read it freely and 
easily. Not until he shall have done this will it be wise 
for him to "begin the study of another language. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE HIGHER MATHEMATICS. 

THE NATURE AND VALUE OF MATHEMATICAL STUDY. 

We have already had something to say in regard to 
the value of mathematical study, in the practical useful- 
ness of its teachings and in the culture it brings with 
it. The practical uses of mathematical knowledge are 
apparent on every hand, and the culture incident to 
close, exact study scarcely needs mention. 

But there are circumstances which affect the relative 
value of the mathematics as compared with other studies, 
and it is necessary that the student who must content 
himself with a partial education, shall have these in 
mind in determining how much of the mathematics he 
will undertake. So far as the bread and butter utility 
of this or any other kind of study goes, — so far as the 
question is one of the market value of the learning to be 
gained, the student will have no difficulty in deciding for 
himself, as in this respect his decision is dependent al- 
most wholly upon the nature of his proposed business 
in life. If he is making an engineer or a mechanician 
of himself, he needs to know all he can learn of ma- 
thematical principle and mathematical fact. If he 



76 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

would be a lawyer, or a merchant, or a physician, his 
practical needs in this matter do not go beyond a good 
knowledge of arithmetic. 

In the matter of culture, however, the case is very 
different. If the student's business or circumstances 
are likely to require a habit of close, exact reasoning, 
careful analysis, and minute investigation, he needs ex- 
actly the culture which a study of the mathematics will 
give him. If his habits of mind are loose and careless, 
— if he knows himself prone to jump at conclusions, 
and to accept opinions upon insufficient evidence, if he 
lacks the power or the habit of discriminating nicely 
between the probable and the proved, he needs the cul- 
ture incident to mathematical study, more than disci- 
pline of any other sort, and should therefore give the 
mathematics as large a place as possible in the course 
he is marking out for himself. 

If, on the other hand, his intellectual wants are of a 
wholly different character, as is often the case, and he 
has but limited time at his disposal, he may spend that 
time in something more profitable to him, at least than 
mathematics. 

Again, in some cases, there may be occasion for some 
drilling in mathematical habits, without the necessity 
which exists in others for a complete course of the 
kind. 

The question in every case must be decided by the 
circumstances surrounding that case, and these circum- 
stances the student only can know fully. He should 
ascertain precisely what Ms wants are, in the matter of 
culture as well as in that of learning, and. govern him- 
self accordingly. 



THE HIGHER MATHEMATICS. 77 



THE PROCESSES. 

The ideal text-book in mathematics is one which ex- 
plains every principle in the order of its use, and after 
explaining it, gives the student exercises which enable 
him to grasp it and to fasten it in his mind. The actual 
text-book falls considerably short of this, as every 
teacher knows, and every student finds out. 

But in the very nature of things, mathematical text- 
books are better adapted to their purpose than text- 
books of any other kind, and there is nothing to pre- 
vent any student of ordinary mathematical capacity 
from proceeding alone from elementary Algebra to the 
Calculus, with no assistance other than that of his text- 
books. Indeed, all there is known of mathematics was 
wrought out originally without even this assistance. 

The exactitude of mathematical processes is such that 
the text-books must of necessity furnish nearly all the 
aid any earnest student, can wish, and hence there is 
comparatively little for us to say here as to the manner 
of pursuing studies of this class. A word or two, how- 
ever, may be of service alike to students in and out of 
school. 

THE ORDER OE STUDIES. 

In regard to the order in which the several branches 
of the mathematics are to be studied, there is very little 
variation. 

We must begin with algebra, of necessity, as it is the 
basis of all the rest, and while many teachers put 
their pupils into geometry, as soon as they are fairly 
grounded in the elements of algebra, it seems to me 
that the plan is in every way a bad one, giving birth 



78 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUBSELF. 

to much trouble throughout the remainder of the 
course, and ending in imperfect scholarship at last. 
Such a course is especially bad when the student has 
no master, and I have rarely known a case in which 
the attempt, on the part of a self-taught student, has 
not resulted either in a complete breaking down and 
an abandonment of the mathematics altogether, or in a 
system of empirical study requiring all the work and 
giving none of the culture incident to a complete mas- 
tery of the science. 

The better plan is to take up first a book on elemen- 
tary algebra, and to master it absolutely. This should 
be followed by Davies' Bourdon, and when the student 
shall have completed that, his road through all the re- 
mainder of the mathematics will be both an open and 
an easy one. 

"With Geometry, Plane and Spherical Trigonometry, 
Analytical Geometry, Navigation and Surveying, which 
are the branches commonly studied before the Differen- 
tial and Integral Calculus is taken up, the order in which 
I have placed them here is as good as any other. 

None of them will present any formidable difficulty 
to the student who has begun by making his knowledge 
of algebra complete, and where this has been done, the 
studies enumerated above should not, in the aggregate, 
demand more time or more work than was necessary to 
the mastery of algebra. 

In other words, algebra, if learned thoroughly, is in 
time and labor about half the ordinary collegiate course 
of pure mathematics.* 

* Surveying and Navigation are, properly, applied and not pure mathemat- 
ics, but for the sake of convenience I follow here the common classification. 



THE HIGHER MATHEMATICS. 79 



THE WAY TO STUDY ALGEBKA. 

When you begin the study of algebra, remember that 
it is fact from beginning to end ; that it has been dis- 
covered, and not invented ; that every operation is the 
application of one or more principles, and that a know- 
ledge of the operations is worth nearly nothing when 
the principles governing them are not fully understood. 
What has been said on this point with regard to the study 
of arithmetic, is, if possible, even more strongly appli- 
cable to that of algebra. 

Beginning with a clear comprehension of these 
points, the student should, as far as possible, follow the 
original process by which the principles of algebra were 
evolved from each other. He should begin with a full 
understanding that the science of abstract numbers is a 
complete structure, made of many parts, each of which 
was learned in the beginning from those which precede 
it, and as far as possible he should build the structure 
piece by piece for himself. To a great extent this may 
be done without a close following of the book, and 
where this is the case the text-book should be used only 
as a general guide, and as a mentor for the verification 
of work and the correction of error. 

Where it is necessary to follow the book strictly, the 
student should endeavor not only to comprehend each 
principle, but to discover also just how it follows from 
those that have preceded it, and how others are to 
grow out of it. 

Almost every new principle will be found to rest upon 
two or three previously learned, each being a corollary 
not ordinarily from any single principle, but from a 



80 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

combination of several, and this synthetical process, 
while it serves to make the student's progress in mathe- 
matical study much more rapid and greatly more satis- 
factory than it otherwise would be, is in itself the very 
best intellectual exercise incident to this branch of 
study. "Without it one may learn mathematics, though 
not quite so thoroughly as with it, but in omitting it he 
loses the greater and better part of the mental disci- 
pline and culture to be derived from mathematical 
studies. 

Moreover this habit serves still another purpose in 
making a study fascinating which is otherwise proverb- 
ially dry and uninteresting to the majority of students. 
Once formed, the habit should be continued through- 
out the course, but I dwell upon it here because algebra 
is the basis of all the other branches of higher mathe- 
matics, furnishing the groundwork of them all, and 
whatever is to be done in this regard must be begun at 
the bottom. 

A. WAY OUT OF DIFFICULTIES. 

As a rule a principle should be thoroughly under- 
stood before it is used at all in the working of problems, 
but sometimes this is impossible, and when the student 
shall find it so, it will be well for him to proceed with 
the problems, applying the principle, as yet but imper- 
fectly understood, as a means of grasping it. Some- 
times the working of a problem or two will make a 
matter transparent which before was wholly incompre- 
sible. But in any event, never leave a principle until 
you do understand it. Never go on to others until you 
know what this one is, and the reason for its being. 



THE HIGHER MATHEMATICS. 81 



ANOTHER WAY OUT OF DIFFICULTIES. 

When the explanations given in the book, and the 
working of the problems, fail to make the principle 
stated as clear as it should be to the student's mind, he 
should at once resort to the simplest available form of 
using the principle, and the result will almost always be 
entirely satisfactory. 

Let me illustrate my meaning. I had a pupil once 
who came to a proposition something like this in her 
algebra : 

4xab — (2xa -f- b) = etc. 

" By the terms of this equation," the book went on to 
say, " we have 

4:%ab — 2xa — 6 ==" etc. 
The pupil could not understand why, in taking the 
2xa -f b put of parenthesis, the plus signs should be 
changed to minus ones. She knew very well that there 
was a rule to that effect in the book, but she was trying 
to learn algebra rather than the rules of algebra, and so 
she sought an explanation. She had already work- 
ed out three or four problems involving this process of 
removing terms from parenthesis, but had been wholly 
unable to grasp the reasons for the change of signs made. 
I substituted figures for the letters and wrote the fol- 
lowing, as different forms of one equation. 

20 — (6 + 4) = 10. 

20 — 6 — 4 = 10. 

20 — 10 = 10. 
Giving her this, I left her to work out the principle in- 
volved for herself, and she soon discovered that the 6 



82 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

and the 4, both positive quantities, were together to be 
subtracted, in obedience to the minus sign, from 20, 
and the reason for the change of signs in removing the 
figures from the parenthesis was apparent at once. 

I strongly commend such a resort to the simplest 
form of arithmetical or algebraic expression which can 
be made to involve the principle, as the very best way 
of grasping what cannot be comprehended at first in 
more abstract or complicated shape. 

The student will have no difficulty in forming for 
himself abundant exercises of this kind, adapted to his 
particular wants as they shall occur. 

rule s. 

In algebra, as in arithmetic, the rules are merely gen- 
eralizations after the fact. As such they are very valu- 
able, but the student is constantly in danger of losing 
sight of their real character, and treating them as rules 
for the solution of problems. 

He should solve his problems on principle, and take 
the rules as succinct statements of what he has done, — 
not as rules for what he has to do. He should remem- 
ber that these rules can have been made only by per- 
sons who were already familiar with the processes of 
which they tell, — that the processes create the rule, 
not the rule the processes. The temptation to err here 
is so great that good teachers often regret the presence 
of any rules at all in the books. 

Not that these concise generalizations are valueless 
by any means. Every teacher knows that they may be 
made of very great use to the student, if only the 
principles involved be thoroughly understood before 
the formulas for their application are learned. 



THE HIGHER MATHEMATICS. 83 

To the schoolboy the danger is far less than to 
the student without a master, anxious to get on. The 
former is made to explain his blackboard operations, 
and thus compelled, to some extent at least, to under- 
stand the principles as he applies them. The self- 
taught youth, on the other hand, has no check upon 
himself but his own will, and is therefore in constant 
danger of making a misuse of the rules in his book. 



THE OTHER MATHEMATICS. 

We have already seen that algebra, thoroughly learn- 
ed, is not only about half the mathematical battle, but 
is in itself a key to everything that follows. Geometry, 
trigonometry, etc., present few difficulties to the 
student who has mastered his algebra before taking 
them up for study. 

The directions given for the study of algebra are, in 
the main, applicable to the entire course, and there is 
little else to be said with reference to the succeeding 
parts of the mathematical curriculum. With a hint or 
two we will pass to other things. 

Concrete study is always better than abstract, and 
self-made problems are usually better for practice than 
those given in the books. 

From first to last, therefore, the student should seize 
every possible opportunity to make problems for him- 
self out of his surroundings, and whenever he can put 
any principle to a practical test in actual affairs, he will 
find it a very excellent thing to do. 

When he shall have learned enough of mathematics 
to do so, he will find it a good plan to measure dis- 
tances by triangulation, beginning with distances which 



84 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUliSELF. 

he can verify with his tape line, and passing on to the 
width of rivers or ponds, and similar practical problems. 

Where he studies surveying, he should at once join 
an engineering party, if possible, doing, in time, all parts 
of the field and chart work, and observing the work of 
others. When this is impracticable he should at least 
spend some weeks in amateur surveying, using his 
compass or his transit instrument himself, and making 
his own field notes. When he shall have done this, his 
notes will furnish him abundant material for chart 
making, and if he has been at all skillful in the selection 
of his ground he will have at his hand problems in- 
volving nearly all the principles his books have taught 
him. 

Mining and other engineering work, practical mecha- 
nics, etc., are within the reach of almost every student 
of applied mathematics, and the student who would 
perfect himself should neglect no opportunity of study- 
ing them thus practically. 

I must add one other suggestion before quitting the 
subject of mathematics, and that is that the student, 
especially if he have no master, should be himself 
a teacher of others if possible. While yet studying 
algebra he should teach some one else the parts over 
which he has passed, and so on throughout the course. 
Teaching others is an excellent aid to the learning of 
anything, and I once knew a young man who learned 
Latin entirely by teaching it to a younger brother. He 
knew the earlier parts of the grammar, and began, half 
in sport, to teach his pupil. The brother learned 
rapidly and forced the teacher to learn in order that he 
might teach, and the end was success for both. 

But teaching is especially valuable to the student of 



THE HIGHER MATHEMATICS. 85 

mathematics, inasmuch as it requires constant analysis 
and a constant explanation of the principles already- 
mastered, and is, withal, the best possible system of re- 
view, where reviewing is most necessary. If a student 
can secure a pupil less advanced than himself, 
therefore, let him do so by all means, and let him not 
count the time spent in teaching as lost, or unprontably 
used. 



CHAPTEK VI. 

PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 

"We have already seen that there are two schools of 
thinkers in the matter of education, the one advocating 
the study of ancient languages as the chief part of 
higher education, while the other estimates such study 
but lightly in comparison with the learning of 
physics. 

Each of these schools is right, doubtless, or nearly 
so, in the estimate it places upon its own favorite 
branch of learning, but each is equally wrong, perhaps, 
in its valuation of the other. The ideal education em- 
braces both the classics and the sciences, and every 
education that can claim to be anything like a worthy 
one must embrace something, at least, of each. 

I have already hinted at the practical importance of 
scientific study, and I have endeavored to suggest some 
of the dangers incident to a too exclusive pursuit of 
learning of this kind. I think the inherent and neces- 
sary tendency of the sciences to narrow specialties is 
full of danger to the student, particularly if his mind 
is not already balanced by a liberal culture in other 
directions. Of course the great work of scientific re- 
search can only be carried forward adequately by scien- 
tific specialists, and we must have such men of neces- 
sity. But no one of them advances science much. 






PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 87 

No one of them grasps enough to do much by himself. 
No one of them is a scientist in the full sense of 
the term. Each does his little part, all the more tho- 
roughly because it is so small, and the aggregate result 
is a grand one. But these little delvers after single 
facts, who must confine their operations to very 
narrow limits, and hedge themselves in on every side 
lest they divide to wasting, do not furnish us models 
of liberally educated men by any means. * 

The story is told of an old German linguist who had 
devoted his whole life to the study of the Greek arti- 
cle, to the exclusion of everything else, that when dy- 
ing he cautioned his son against the danger of wasting 
his energies by attempting too much. " This has been 
my own error in life," he said. " I have taken the 
whole article for a study, and it is too great for any one 
man's mastery. I ought to have confined myself to the 
dative case." 

The aggregate of such men's work is a grand one, 
and the work is one which could never be done except 
by men willing to work within these limits. 

The world cannot spare men of this kind. Neither 
can we spare the toilers in mines, but the value of their 
work does not in any way lessen the peril it brings to 
the workers. 

Let me not be misunderstood. The scientific special- 

* Of course I am not now speaking of the eminent scientific men, who, 
-while they are unquestionably students of specialties, are also broadly culti- 
vated in things other than science, and in science know vastly more than 
their chosen specialties embrace. Men of this kind are models for all of us 
and as will be seen elsewhere, I hold that to be the best practical education 
which makes its possessor complete master of some one thing, and reasonably 
familiar with other branches of human knowledge. What the student is es- 
especially urged to do is to lay the broadest foundation of general culture 
possible, and then to do what he wishes to do in any particular direction. 



88 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

ist does his full share of the world's work and should 
receive his full share of its honors. He does his work 
all the better because he works at but one thing. So 
does the man in a watch factory, who knows nothing 
about the manufacture of a watch except how to cut 
the cogs on a single wheel. Neither he nor airy one of 
his hundred fellows could possibly make a watch, but 
together they produce much .better watches than any 
one man can possibly make. 

I say nothing against the system of specialties as a 
means of forwarding scientific investigation. I only 
say that the too exclusive study of specialties is not 
the best form of education for the development of well- 
balanced men, and that, in this view of the matter, the 
tendency of all scientific study to run into excess in 
this direction is a danger incident to it. 

I need not detail the advantages of scientific know- 
ledge. They are everywhere evident, and the tendency 
of the age is to exalt physics, even to the depreciation 
of everything else. 

WHAT PHYSICS TO STUDY. 

The student who can push his education beyond the 
narrowest possible limits, will almost certainly wish to 
learn something of physical science. That he should 
do so there can be no doubt. But there are so many 
branches of scientific study that unless he has some 
special inducement to some one of them it will puzzle 
him to determine just what and how much to take up. 

There are several points to be considered in deciding 
the question. 

In the first place the sciences are not like the lan- 
guages. All our tongues are akin, it is true, but they 



PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 89 

are so far separate and individual wholes that they 
must ordinarily be treated as almost wholly distinct, 
when we ask ourselves which of them we will learn. It 
is not so with the sciences. These so far run into each 
other as to be in some sense one. They are but parts of 
a whole — the whole being nature in all her conditions. 
They are classified separately, but each involves some- 
thing of the others. Chemistry and natural philosophy 
underlie most of them, and it is impossible to know any 
one of them thoroughly without knowing something of 
at least some of the others. 

THE OBJECT SOUGHT. 

Now, with this fact in mind, the student must ask 
himself what his purpose is, in the study of science, 
and how much time he ought to give to its pursuit. If 
his object be to advance himself in any business in 
which a knowledge of chemistry, or of botany, or of 
mineralogy, or of some other branch of physics will be 
of special use, let him by all means pursue the study 
needed. 

If he simply wishes to become liberally educated, he 
will want to know all the more commonly studied 
sciences at least moderately well. 

The subjects with which the several sciences deal are 
manifest enough to need no explanation, and the stu- 
dent can make his selections advisedly from the first. 

HOW TO STUDY PHYSICS. 

Science is so largely experimental, as yet, that there 
can be no such thing as perfect and exact text-books on 
the subject. The chemists thought for many years 



93 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

after chemistry became a recognized branch of physical 
study, that water was an elementary substance, and 
when the idea that it is a compound was first put 
forth, it was stoutly denied by nearly all the chem- 
ists of the day. Now our greatest scientists do not feel 
at all certain that they have as yet discovered any ab- 
solutely elementary substance. They are more confi- 
dent of carbon in this respect than of anything else, 
but they readily admit that even carbon may prove to 
be a compound. Everything about what we ordin- 
arily call the sciences is in a state of development and 
progress. We are learning new facts and correcting old 
errors every day. Every branch of scientific study is 
changing its teachings, and therefore there can be 
nothing like permanency in the text-books, and none 
but the latest of these should be used. 

This is the first point to be observed. Let the stu- 
dent get the very latest recognized authorities in every 
case, and when he shall come to study them, let him 
remember constantly that their statements of fact are 
in many cases only statements of the best received opi- 
nion as to facts still under investigation, and still but 
uncertainly known. It is only in this spirit, and with 
this understanding, that he can hope to benefit himself 
largely by the study of physics. 

The facts just stated lead, too, to another injunction. 
The student who would make himself anything more 
than a mere parrot in his knowledge of physical 
science, must be to some extent a pioneer. He may 
accept authority in a general way, but he should always 
feel himself free to reverently doubt its conclusions, and 
to test them for himself by personal observation and 
experiment. There is no other way of accomplish- 



PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 91 

ing any worthy results in these branches of human 
learning, and I put these cautions at the fore, for the 
reason that their absence results in so many, 
failures. 

In the study of science, whether on a large or small 
scale, whether in a general or a special way, no in- 
structor is at all necessary to the earnest student. The 
rudimentary parts are all easily learned from the text- 
books, and in our day there is no lack of able and ex- 
haustive treatises of a higher sort. All these may be 
mastered quite as well without as with a teacher, and 
while the apparatus and the collections of specimens in 
our colleges furnish excellent aids to the study of all 
the sciences, their absence is not fatal by any means. 
Plates supply their places in part, and a little industry 
will enable the student to supply them still farther in 
many ways. 

I know a woman, living in a retired country place, 
who without teachers has made herself an accom- 
plished botanist, and not only so, but she has, little 
by little, accumulated an herbarium that would do 
honor to a college, and her country garden has a bo- 
tanical corner where she has tested rare plants from 
every quarter of the world. 

I know a young man, too — or rather a boy, for he is 
hardly of age yet — who, with very meagre educational 
advantages of any sort, has so far mastered natural 
history as to have attracted the attention of distin- 
guished professors, who have been glad to avail them- 
selves of his services as an assistant in their work. His 
collection of specimens, too, is a very creditable one. 

I mention these things for the encouragement of 
students who wish to follow scientific studies, 1 - L 



92 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

doubt their ability to accomplish the purpose worthily 
without instructors and without access to the collections 
and cabinets of the colleges. 

So far as the sciences can be learned from books at 
all, they may be learned without masters. Beyond this 
the student will ordinarily have no need to go, unless 
he wishes to make a specialist of himself, and in that 
event he must resort to direct investigation on his own 
account, attaching himself, if possible to scientific 
expeditions, or in some other way securing the best 
conditions of study at his command. 



CHAPTEE VII. 

MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL SCIENCE. 

THE VALUE OF THIS KIND OF STUDY. 

In marking out his schedule of studies there is no 
class of subjects which the self-guided student so often 
overlooks as that which forms the subject of this chapter. 

It is worthy of remark that in the University of 
Virginia, and other institutions where the studies are 
optional, and where men graduate separately in the 
several schools, the students who do not work for de- 
grees more frequently omit studies of this class than 
those of any other. I have even known students in 
these institutions, who graduated in all the schools but 
this, and left without degrees, because they deemed the 
study of intellectual science so wholly valueless that 
they could not afford to devote to it even the limited 
time which would have been necessary to add its diplo- 
ma to their others, and thus to secure their degree. 

THE CAUSE OF THE MISTAKE. ' 

The mistake is a very natural one, doubtless, but 
none the less serious on that account. 

In our age and country the utilitarian idea has be- 
come so strong that it often transcends its proper 



94 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUESELF. 

limits. People who measure everything by its practical 
value, are very apt to see utility only in those things 
which bring money to the purse ; and further than this 
they nearly always fail to reach sound conclusions even 
in this respect, by falling into the error of looking only 
at the value of the learning acquired in particular 
studies, estimating the culture at nothing. 

A moment's reflection should show the student the 
fallacy of both of these conclusions. Inasmuch as 
money is by no means the only good to be sought in 
life, things which do not add to the ability to make 
money may be quite as useful and quite as practical as 
those that do ; and in estimating even the money value 
of education, the culture it brings is quite as worthy 
of consideration as the learning incident to it. 

THE VALUE OP THESE STUDIES AS A MEANS OF CULTURE. 

Now as a means of high culture there is hardly any 
part of the college course more valuable than the 
studies embraced under the general head of moral and 
intellectual philosophy. It is true too that these 
studies are peculiarly valuable, even if they be mea- 
sured by the most strictly practical standard. 

The object of education, as we have already seen, is 
to fit the man for life ; to prepare him to fill, as per- 
fectly as possible, his place in the world ; to enable him 
to do his best work for himself and for others, and cer- 
tainly no one should doubt that the cultivation and de- 
velopment of the reasoning faculties, and their instruc- 
tion in the laws which should govern all their opera- 
tions, are matters of moment to this end. At every 
step in life we are called upon to use precisely the facul- 
ties which are cultivated by studies of this class, and at 



MOBAL AND INTELLECTUAL SCIENCE. 95 

least half the failures and nearly all the blunders we 
make result from the imperfect or perverse action of 
these faculties. 

Of course no amount of training can make our judg- 
ments perfect, or enable us to reason infallibly on any 
speculative subject ; but from the study of intellectual 
philosophy we learn the principles of sound reasoning 
and cultivate habits of correct thought, which cannot 
fail to serve us in good stead throughout life. 

Reason is our crown of glory. It is the ability to 
reason that chiefly distinguishes us from brute beasts, 
and elevates us above them, and certainly there can be 
no part of education more to be desired than that 
which deals with this faculty, teaches us its nature, and 
its laws, and trains us in its use. 

THEIR VALUE AS A PREPARATION FOR OTHER STUDY. 

But aside from all this, the studies of this class are 
peculiarly valuable as aids to the mastery of others. 
The student who has trained himself somewhat in the 
ability to reason logically, and has cultivated that abili- 
ty by following out the ratiocinations of able thinkers 
in the text-books which follow Logic, will find far less 
difficulty in his study of mathematics and the physical 
sciences than he otherwise would, while the still larger 
education which comes from within rather than from 
without— the education of intelligent and systematic 
thought, can only come fully to those who have, in one 
way or another, cultivated themselves in this direction. 

Of course I do not mean to say that the art of rea- 
soning correctly is wholly an art to be learned, or that 
there are no studies other than those we are now con- 
sidering, which serve to cultivate and develop the facul- 



96 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

ties in question. The mathematics do this in a very 
large degree, and other studies help, too, in their several 
ways. Even outside of study altogether, men cultivate 
the reasoning faculties constantly. But faculties so all- 
important as these should receive the best possible 
training and the fullest measure of it. It is not enough 
that we shall reason approximately well ; we need to rea- 
son at our very best, and to this end we need not only to 
exercise and cultivate these faculties of mind, but also to 
inform them fully as to their own processes, the rules that 
should govern them, the errors into which they are apt 
to fall, and the tests by which the accuracy of their 
operations can be measured. To this end we need to 
learn logic theoretically and to familiarize ourselves with 
its applications in the text-books which follow logic in 
the regular order of studies. 



THE PRACTICAL WISDOM OF THEIR TEACHINGS. 

In addition to all this, we find in the course of study 
now under consideration much practical wisdom that 
every man needs ; inasmuch as our moral perceptions 
are never so keen or so perfect as they should be, we 
cannot fail to derive great benefit from a study of sys- 
tematic ethics. While we are yet children we may 
govern ourselves in the matter morals by the precepts 
of our natural advisers and guardians, but when we 
become men and women' we need such a grounding in 
the laws of morality that we shall be able to govern 
ourselves intelligently without leading-strings. Educa- 
tion contemplates the development and culture of the 
whole man, — the ripening of all his faculties, mental, 
moral, and physical, and the education which does not 



MOEAL AND INTELLECTUAL SCIENCE. 97 

include the culture of the moral sense and its subjection 
to law, is lamentably deficient. 

The other studies of this class are similarly valuable. 
Our knowledge of English can never be what it should 
be, until we shall have learned something of the laws 
of figurative language, which, though not strictly a part 
of intellectual philosophy, are so nearly akin to it as to 
be classed with it in most courses of study. There is 
nothing in which young writers and speakers are more 
apt to blunder than in the use of figures of speech, and 
it is no uncommon thing for a reader to lose the 
force of a passage or to misconceive its meaning totally, 
from a want of just this training. 

The same thing is true of the other parts of Rheto- 
ric. They serve to perfect the student in the use of his 
mother tongue, and should if possible be added to the 
course of English study already prescribed in a former 
chapter. 

Political Economy deserves a large share of the atten- 
tion in any case, and with us, in a country where the 
people govern, or more properly, perhaps, where they 
could govern if they would, there is certainly no sub- 
ject of speculative study so universally needed. 

"We all complain of mob rule, of the tyranny of pai- 
ties, of the reign of rings and cabals and cliques ; we 
all lament the corruption and the venality of our poli- 
tics, and yet we have only ourselves to blame for the 
lamentable facts of which we complain. We take no 
trouble to inform ourselves upon the principles of gov- 
ernment. W r e attach ourselves to parties. We call 
ourselves Democrats or Republicans as our prejudices 
may dictate, and blindly vote for the men nominated by 
the selfish managers of these parties, taking their doc- 



98 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

trines of governmental policy and their personal hon- 
esty upon trust, until our elections have come to be 
little more than a scramble for spoils. 

Now and then we meet men who dare to be indepen- 
dent of party, and vote intelligently for the weal of the 
state ; but these are few indeed, and the great majority 
even of otherwise intelligent men vote the ticket 
of their party without inquiry as to the correctness of 
its principles, the wisdom or justice of its policy, or even 
the personal rectitude and trustworthiness of the men 
it commends to their suffrages. 

Every political platform is simply an insult to all in- 
telligent men. These documents profess to set forth 
the doctrines and policy advocated by the party and 
represented in its candidates. In point of fact they do 
nothing of the kind. They are simply cleverly executed 
palimpsests which may be read either way ; they are in- 
geniously contrived traps for the catching of votes, and 
when once their purpose has been served, nobody ever 
thinks of holding the officers, who have been elected 
upon them, to an honest fulfillment of their promises. 

These are notorious facts, and in them lies, without 
doubt, the greatest danger to which our republican in- 
stitutions are exposed. We are, as a people, altogether 
too ignorant of political economy, and we care too 
little about it. 

If we would govern ourselves well, and free our- 
selves from the despotism of corrupt parties, we must 
take the matter really and truly into our own hands. 
We must inform ourselves upon the laws of political 
economy and be prepared to vote as our convictions of 
justice and policy may dictate, without regard to the 
consistency which demands a perpetual adherence to a 



MOEAL AND INTELLECTUAL SCIENCE. 99 

party name ; and when any considerable portion of the 
American people shall do this, even though it be but a 
respectable minority, its possession of the " balance of 
power " will compel a purification of parties, and force 
them to set forth clearly, distinctly and honestly their 
real principles and purposes, and to carry them out 
faithfully when in power. 

That such an end is greatly to be desired, nobody 
will deny, and it can only be accomplished by individ- 
ual efforts. But if it shall never be reached even ap- 
proximately there is still no reason why the student 
should neglect to make himself as intelligently capa- 
ble as possible, of the performance of his duties as a 
citizen. 

THE OEDEE AND METHODS OF STUDY. 

Having glanced thus briefly at the value and import- 
ance of studies of this class, we come now to the ques- 
tion of the order and the methods of their pursuit. 

Except that Logic underlies most of them to a great 
extent, and should therefore be the first of these sub- 
jects taken up, there is no very necessary order of se- 
quence to be preserved, and should circumstances make 
it desirable to alter the order I shall give, there will be 
noJiarm done. Otherwise I think the student's pro- 
gress will be more systematic and satisfactory if he will 
take them up somewhat as they are arranged below. 
* He should begin with Logic, and his text-book need 
not be a very large or a very costly one. A compact, 
concise treatise on the subject will give him its princi- 
ples fully, and enlighten him sufficiently in regard to 
the modes of their application. A very excellent man- 
ual of this kind was issued some years ago by Profes- 



100 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

sor Coppee, of the United States Military Academy at 
West Point. The first edition, which is the only one 
I have seen, was full of typographical errors, many 
of them marring the sense ; but this defect has doubt- 
less been cured in later editions. If so, I know of no 
better work on the subject for the use of students with- 
out masters. Its statements of principle are singularly 
clear and concise ; its illustrations are very apt, and its 
brevity and cheapness are greatly in its favor. 

With such a text-book, of which there are several of 
nearly equal value, the student can easily master the 
elements of Logic. He will need only to read it care- 
fully twice — the first time slowly, that he may under- 
stand its principles in detail, the second time more ra- 
pidly, that he may fix the system, as a whole, in his 
mind. 

He should then take up Ehetoric, studying it very 
much in the same way, but adding to the study of the 
book such exercises as will readily suggest themselves 
for the fixing of its rules in his mind, and for intelli- 
gent practice in its teachings. 

Archbishop Whateley's and Professor Coppee's treat- 
ises are as good, perhaps, as any others as elementary 
text-books, and their study should be followed by the 
perusal of works of a more elaborate kind on the sub- 
ject, such, for instance, as Campbell's Philosophy of 
Rhetoric. 

After completing the study of elementary Rhetoric, 
however, and before reading more exhaustive works on 
the subject, the student should read Lord's Laws of 
Figurative Language, or some similar manual, as a pro- 
per supplement to the study of systematic Rhetoric in 
its elementary form. 



MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL SCIENCE. 101 

Next in order should come Ethics, and for an ele- 
mentary text-book, I know of nothing better than Dr. 
Francis Wayland's Elements of Moral Science, which 
is used more generally, perhaps, than any other, in the 
colleges of this country. It needs only a careful read- 
ing, to make its principles clear to the student's mind, 
and it should, if possible, be followed by some more 
elaborate work on the philosophy of morals, such for 
instance as Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, or Victor 
Cousin's The Good, Beautiful and True. 

Many students will find in the list already given as 
much labor as they can well devote to abstract studies 
of this kind. They will already have learned some- 
thing of metaphysics, and will have no time to devote to 
the study of intellectual philosophy, pure and simple. 
These will need to pass at once to Political Econ- 
omy. 

But where the limitations of time are not so narrow, 
I strongly recommend a course in mental philosophy, 
strictly so called, and it should properly follow the 
studies we have just considered. 

The student should read Lord Bacon's Novum Or- 
ganum, Locke on the Understanding, and Brown's 
Philosophy of the Human Mind, as text-books, to 
which, if he wishes to extend his philosophical reading, 
he may add, with advantage, the works of Herbert 
Spencer, Sir William Hamilton, Dr. McCosh, President 
Noah Porter, John Stuart Mill, and others, as occasion 
may serve. 

The line between systematic, text-book study, and 
general reading is here so narrow that I add the fore- 
going catalogue of books in this place, though most of 



102 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

thein belong rather to the chapter on General Read- 
ing. 

We come next to Political Economy ; and here again 
it is very difficult to draw the lioe between study, in the 
schoolroom sense of the term, and general reading. I 
content myself, therefore, with remarking that the stu- 
dent needs first to acquaint himself with the principles 
of political economy from some good text-book — Dr. 
"Wayland's Elements is the best one for the purpose, I 
think — and then to read as largely on the subject as he 
can, taking care to examine both sides of the questions 
on which our political philosophers differ widely. The 
chief of these is Free Trade vs. Protection, and on 
such a question the student should at least hear what 
both the schools have to say. If he has preconceived 
notions on the subject, as most of us have, there is the 
greater necessity for an examination of the arguments 
of the writers with whose conclusions he is at issue. 
For a brief but pretty complete course of reading on 
the subject I would recommend 

Adam Smith's " Wealth of Nations ;" 

John Stuart Mill's "Principles of Political Economy;" 

Mill's " System of Political Economy ;" 

Horace Greeley's " Science of Political Economy," and 

H. C. Carey's u Political Economy." 

And these may be read in any order of sequence, 
without material change of result. 

I name these for the benefit of students who desire 
merely to make themselves familiar with the general 
features of the subject. Those who wish to study it 
thoroughly as a specialty, will of course read Bentham, 
De Quincey, Malthus, Colton, M'Culloch,and a score of 
other authors. 



MOBAL AND INTELLECTUAL SCIENCE. 103 

A similar enlargement of the course in other direc- 
tions — logical, ethical or otherwise — will suggest itself 
to students who wish to make any of these a subject of 
special study, and for information as to the various 
books extant of these and other kinds, reference may 
be had to The Best Reading, a book published by 
Messrs. G.P. Putnam & Sons, in which the principal 
works on every subject are given in the alphabetical or- 
der of their authors' names, under alphabetically ar- 
ranged titles as to subject, class, etc., and their compar- 
ative standing- in literature indicated as nearly as prac- 
ticable. The book may be had for a trine, and cannot 
fail to be of very great service to any person who in- 
tends to read at all extensively, or to collect even the 
smallest library. 

Even where no such purpose exists, such classified 
dictionaries of books are valuable as reading matter, as 
will be seen in our next chapter. 



CHAPTER VIII 



GENERAL HEADING. 



SOME WOKDS OF WARNING. 



The student who shall follow at all adequately the 
course of study sketched in the preceding chapters, 
will, at its conclusion, have completed a very fair curri- 
culum, and he will be master of most of the branches 
included in an ordinary collegiate education. 

But by all means let him not make the mistake, too 
often fatal even to collegians, of supposing that his ed- 
ucation is in any sense complete, and that he has 
enough either of the information or of the culture 
which constitute an education. In point of fact he has 
only learned how to educate himself and mastered the 
rudiments of his life studies. He has yet to read ex- 
tensively, and to think, — to study general literature and 
to study men and things ; he has yet to become com- 
plete master of himself, — to learn much in the school 
of self-criticism, to apply what he has learned to the; 
practical affairs of life, and to make it his guide to the 
acquisition of larger measures of information and cul- 
ture, — he has all this to do if he would reap the full 
rewards of his labor. And should he continue his work 



GENERAL READING. 105 

for a lifetime, there will still be more' unlearned than 
learned, and the culture will still be imperfect. 

The point I would here enforce is simply this, that 
the course of study marked out for the student here 
and in the colleges, constitutes nothing more than an 
introduction to the real work of securing ripe scholar- 
ship and thorough culture. 

I would have the student learn that there is more of 
information and infinitely more of culture to be gained 
in the study of general literature and in actual intellec- 
tual work, than in the most thorough of collegiate train- 
ings. 

As a preparation for profitable reading and success- 
ful work, regular systematic study cannot be too highly 
esteemed, but it should never for a moment be 
mistaken for the end to which it is only the means. 

If, therefore, the student's time is so limited that his 
pursuit of systematic study will seriously abridge his 
after reading and other intellectual work, I strongly 
urge him to forego the former in large measure for the 
sake of the latter ; to content himself with a thorough 
mastery of the common school course I have recom- 
mended, and the merest outline of the one following it, 
that he may have time for the higher and better edu- 
cation of the library. 

Extensive general reading may make cultivated, well- 
informed, well-balanced men without much knowledge 
of the text-books ; but no amount of text-book study, 
without extensive reading, ever yet brought about such 
a result. 

I argue now, not against systematic study, but in favor 
of general reading. The study of text-books is an ad- 
mirable beginning in the work of education, but it is 



106 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

not the whole of that work. It is a means and not an 
end. It is very valuable, but not absolutely necessary 
in all cases, while a general acquaintance with literature, 
a large reading of books, is necessary always to anything 
like thorough culture, and may, by itself, accomplish the 
result. 

Now, if the reader be indolent and inclined to self- 
indulgence, he will almost certainly construe these re- 
marks into an easy excuse for his neglect of text- 
books, and I cannot help it. He may rest assured, how- 
ever that indolent people are not the ones who manage 
to make reasonably well-educated men of themselves 
without much acquaintance with text-books, and that in 
any event his readiness to abandon the more laborious 
preliminary task argues badly for his success in the 
after work. 

The training of the regular course is the best possible 
preparation for the self-culture that comes after it, and 
the young man who deliberately omits this preparation 
gives small promise of success without it. 

The purpose of this volume is to tell the student 
what constitutes education, and how to secure as com- 
plete a one as his circumstances will permit. To 
this end I must show him the comparative impor- 
tance of the several parts of his work, so that he may 
select judiciously where he must select some parts of 
the whole to the exclusion of others. My advice to 
every reader is,— Make your education as thorough, as 
wide, as complete and as well balanced as possible, but 
if you must omit some things belonging to the regular 
scheme, get all the light you can in regard to their com- 
parative values, and then select, for omission, those 
which are the least necessary, remembering all the time 



GENERAL READING. 107 

that every such omission is a loss which you cannot 
afford to sustain, if you can possibly help it. And this 
is precisely the extent of my meaning when I say that, 
as between text-book study and general reading, the 
preference should be given to general reading. 

AN EXCEPTION. 

To all this, however, there is one exception which 
must be made. In cases where for any good reason the 
student's purpose is the mastery of a specialty, he 
must of course make the text-books bearing on that 
specialty the basis of all his work, and must master 
them absolutely. But even this is an exception only in 
appearance, for students of this class, after they shall 
have mastered the text-books in their particular line, 
if their time is limited, will do better to pass at once 
to more general reading on the subject they have in 
hand, than to devote themselves to the study of text- 
books foreign to their purpose. 

WHAT TO BEAD. 

There is no question more frequently asked than 
" What shall I read ?" Certainly there is no question 
more difficult to answer. 

No man ever yet read all that he might have read 
with profit, and no reading man ever read half that he 
would have liked to read. The best that any of us can 
do in the matter is to do our best. That is to say, we 
can only read a part of what we need and would like 
to read, governing our selections in this, as in every 
thing else, by the circumstances in which we are 
placed. 

An intelligent conception of the object we have in 



108 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

view, however, and a little attention to the peculiar ser- 
vice which each particular class of literature is capable 
of rendering us, will greatly aid us in determining in 
a general way what we will read, and for the rest we 
must trust largely to accident and impulse. 

If a man read only for amusement, he is very apt to 
read the most entertaining books within his reach, but 
in such cases accident has a large share in determining 
his selection. I have even known fairly intelligent men, 
when shut up under stress of weather at a country inn, 
where they could get nothing else, to read the dreary 
drivellings in sentimental annuals, rather than listen to 
the drearier drivellings of a tiresome landlord. 

In these and similar cases, accident is the evident 
determiner of the choice. But even where the stress of 
circumstance is not so sore, at least half our reading is 
in part accidental, or the result of impulse. And, after 
all, if the taste be reasonably well cultivated, and there is 
no special end in view, it is a pretty good plan to follow 
the advice of an old reader, who, when requested by a 
youngster to mark out a liberal course of reading for 
him, wrote in reply, " Eead just what you wish to read, — 
that is the most liberal course I can suggest." 

Even this, however, is a course of reading impossible 
to follow fully, for who that reads at all ever succeeded 
in reading half that he wished ? 

But the taste is not always well cultivated, and so is 
often an unsafe guide. 

Again, men do not all read merely for amusement, and 
those who care to make use of this manual are only 
those whose reading is for a definite purpose of some 
sort, general or particular. Now the differences of idui- 
pose on the part of different people make all the differ- 



GENERAL READING. 109 

ence in the world in the answers that should be given 
to the question we are considering. 

The first thing to be determined, therefore, is the 
purpose for which you intend to read, and the purposes 
of different people in this regard are as various as can 
well be imagined. 

I remember hearing a young man ask an old reader 
what he should read, when a conversation something 
like this ensued: 

Old Reader. — What do you want to read for ? 

Young Man. — That is rather a difficult question to 
answer. 

Old Header. — Very well. But you must answer it be- 
fore I can possibly advise you what to read. If you 
wish to become a physician, I would strongly advise you 
to read standard medical works in preference to any 
others. If you aspire to the law, you might begin with 
Blackstone as an introductory work, following it up 
Kent's Commentaries and 

Young Man. — I don't want anything of that sort ; I 
only want to inform myself generally. 

Old Reader. — Very well. But I doubt that. Do you 
mean that you really wish to become a well-informed- 
man, or do you merely wish to appear so — to be able to 
join in conversations on a great variety of subjects, and 
make a fair showing in society ? 

The young man admitted that this last was about his 
idea, though he seemed to have just discovered the 
fact. 

" Very well, I say again," said the old reader, " your 
object is a very common one, and is easily accom- 
plished. You have only to read Burton's Anatomy of 
Melancholy. If you can stand a little more, it would be 



110 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

well enough to add Shakspeare to the list. The Bible 
you will read, of course." 

The old reader was right. The purpose the young 
man had in view is a very common one, and the short- 
est possible road to its accomplishment is the one his 
adviser pointed out. 

The incident serves also to show how essential it is 
to an intelligent selection of reading-matter that the 
prospective reader shall know precisely what are his 
objects in reading. In this, as in everything else, he 
should ascertain what he wants before he sets about 
the task of selecting it. 

And yet this is rarely done. People who want to 
read are very apt either to trust blindly to accident, or 
to ask somebody to mark out a course for them to fol- 
low, or to adopt from some autobiography or other the 
course its author wishes that he had followed. 

COURSES OF READING. 

As a rule, set courses of reading are not advisable. 
In the first place, the cases in which they are faithfully 
followed are very few indeed, and where they are begun 
and after a while abandoned, a serious injury is done to 
to the reader, by his failure to carry out a purpose de- 
liberately formed. 

But aside from this, it is impossible for any person to 
decide, in advance of the reading, just what set of books 
will best accomplish his purpose. Suppose, for the 
sake of example, that the student wishes to make him- 
self acquainted with the history of the times of the Stu- 
arts. At the outset his course seems plain enough. 
There are half a dozen histories to be re&d, and a few 
books of the period to be looked over. But before he 






GENERAL EEADING. HI 

shall have fairly started in his first history he will find 
that he needs to know something of the history of Eng- 
land previous to the accession of James the First. Then 
he will find that a clear comprehension of this much of 
English history is only possible to people who know, in 
a general way, the history of Europe during the middle 
ages, He will want also to know the causes of the Be- 
formation, and of the peculiarities of the English revolt 
from Catholicism. To this end he must read something 
of church history and theological controversy. Many 
such necessities will arise, and it is hardly probable that 
the student can have marked out in the beginning just 
the books he now finds it necessary to read. He must 
either abandon the course originally determined upon 
and adopt a very different one, or else he must go on 
with the consciousness that he is allowing his pre- 
conceived rule of action to thwart the purpose it was 
designed to further. 

All this is still more applicable, of course, to those 
cases in which the purpose is wider and more compre- 
hensive than the one supposed above. It is not possi- 
ble that the student, before he has begun his course of 
reading, can be at all competent to decide of what that 
course shall consist. 

And the case is not changed materially by the calling 
in of a friend to act as adviser, for the best that he can 
do practically is to mark out two or three or four 
courses, between which the student must himself 
choose, and this is precisely what he is incompetent to 
do wisely. 

The better plan, and indeed the only plan at all 
practicable, is to determine clearly your purpose in 
reading, and then to choose your books as you go on. 



112 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

with strict reference to that purpose. You will find 
at every step abundant suggestions as to the next books 
to be taken up, and the only embarrassment with 
which you will meet will be that arising from the very 
multiplicity of desirable text-books. 

I once knew a literary man who wanted to write an 
article on cats, and knowing very little about the sub- 
ject he set himself to work reading up. He told me 
that in the outset he expected to find nothing 
about the animals in question, outside of the encyclo- 
pedias and natural histories. His first examination of 
one of these suggested four books to be consulted. 
These made frequent reference to others, and becoming 
interested in his subject he bought, before he knew it, 
a whole shelf full of cat literature, and then, as a matter 
of economy, began to frequent the great public libraries 
in search of the hundreds of other books from each of 
which something was to be learned about cats. He 
quitted the subject at last, but felt in quitting that he 
had not exhausted it. 

Precisely the same thing may be done in any direc- 
tion, and the only difficulty often is to know when to 
quit the pursuit of a topic for something else, and here 
again the predetermined purpose will be the best 
guide. 

SOME GOOD RULES. 

Believing as I do that prearranged courses of reading 
are not advisable, I shall of course mark out none, and 
holding that the reader should in every case decide for 
himself what he will read, I shall make no attempt to 
decide for him. But a few suggestions may enable him 
to see his own way more clearly. 



GENERAL READING. 113 



READING UP. 

Of course, when there is a particular subject ou which 
the student wishes to inform himself, his only course is 
to " read up " on it, as the hack writers say, and the 
extent to which he should do this will be measured in 
each case by the extent of the need suggesting it. If he 
desires to make himself thorough master of a specialty, 
in all its bearings, he must read carefully everything he 
can find having reference to it. If he merely wishes to 
acquaint himself generally with the subject, a less elabo- 
rate reading will suffice. 

There are many people who do all their reading in 
this way, and in the end they become pretty well in- 
formed on most subjects, but I doubt the wisdom of 
such a course where there are no circumstances to make 
it necessary. It is not productive of as much culture as 
other systems are, and people who practice it are very 
apt to read nothing at all at times when they have no 
special subject in hot chase. And yet the plan has the 
sanction of some great names. Among others Richard 
Brinsley Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith are notable 
examples. It is related of the former that on one oc- 
casion, when a great financial question was under con- 
sideration in the House of Commons, he announced 
that he intended to speak upon it. His friends re- 
ceived the announcement with wondering smiles, as 
Sheridan was proverbial for his utter ignorance of 
figures. He had four days, however, in which to " read 
up," and at the end of that time he delivered one of the 
most masterly arithmetical arguments ever heard in the 
House. 

His success showed what he could do in the way of 



114: ' HOW TO EDUCATE YOUKSELF. 

" cramming ;" but with all his brilliancy, it can hardly 
be said that Sheridan was a very good model for any- 
body's following. 

READING TO CURE DEFECTS. 

There is one respect, however, in which it is very de- 
sirable that all our reading should be to some extent of 
this character. As in text-book study, so also in gene- 
ral reading, an effort should be made to supply defects 
both of information and of culture. The weak places 
need, and should have a constant strengthening. It is 
in these points that we fail, and it is of the utmost im- 
portance that our intellectual armor be made as com- 
plete and perfect as possible. 

To this end the student must carefully study himself 
as his master would study him, recognizing every fault 
and every defect, in order that he may know clearly 
what he has to supply. 

So far as the mere acquisition of information is con- 
cerned, this task is an easy one, but in the matter of 
culture it is more difficult, though even here we may 
know ourselves reasonably well if we choose to make 
the effort fairly and with as little prejudice as possible. 
Indeed we must do it, if we would make anything like 
well-balanced men and women of ourselves. 

Having discovered important defects in his culture 
or his stock of information, the student should give 
himself at once to the work of curing them by reading- 
such books as are best adapted to the accomplishment 
of that end. 

READING TO STRENGTHEN STRONG POINTS. 

On the other hand, if the student recognizes in him 



GENERAL READING. 115 

self any point of peculiar strength. — anything in which 
he is likely, from peculiar constitution or taste, to 
achieve an especial success, it will always be best for 
him to subordinate everything else to the cultivation of 
the one faculty which constitutes his strength. 

READING BOTH SIDES. 

In either case, whether the sludent reads for the full 
rounding of his education or for its perfection in a sin- 
gle direction, there is nothing more important than that 
he shall read both sides of every question he shall take 
up. If he read Hume's History of England, for instance, 
that reading will make Lingard almost a necessity to 
him. 

That this is true of all speculative and historical lite- 
rature is apparent, but the principle has a wider appli- 
cation than this. Even in matters of mere taste it is 
well to cultivate catholicity, and so it is a good plan to 
select poetry and other imaginative literature with re- 
ference to the cultivation of a wide and generous appre- 
ciativeness that shall embrace something more than a 
single school of poets or novelists. Mr. Thackeray re- 
joiced in his daughter's persistent and perpetual read- 
ing of Dickens, but it would have been greatly better 
for her had she turned sometimes from Nicholas Nic- 
kleby to Vanity Fair, even if she had .made no more 
radical change of intellectual diet, for the prevention of 
intellectual dyspepsia. 

HOW MUCH OF A BOOK TO BEAD. 

Inasmuch as we cannot possibly read half or even a 
tenth of the books we would like to read, it is very im- 
portant that we waste no time reading the less desira- 
ble portions of the books we do take up. 



116 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

It is a rule often laid down for readers that they 
should never begin a book without going entirely 
through it. Now if every book contained only cream, 
and if there were only a very few books in the world 
worth reading, this would be excellent advice.' But un- 
fortunately there is a good deal of very thin skim-milk 
in many books that have some cream in them, and there 
are many more valuable books than any one can read. 

"When our purpose with a book has been served — 
when we have read those parts of it that we want, it is 
simply a waste of precious time to go on reading the 
parts that we do not particularly want, even though 
they be good in themselves, when there are so many 
other books that we greatly need to read. 

Suppose, for instance, that you are studying the sub- 
ject of popular education. In the middle of Mr. Her- 
bert Spencer's Social Statics there is a chapter bear- 
ing upon the subject which you must certainly read. 
When you shall have read that, it would be simply ab- 
surd for you to go on and read the remainder of the 
book, although every chapter of it is valuable. You 
are reading for a particular purpose, and you have 
many books to read before that purpose will be accom- 
plished. The one chapter is all that this book has to 
offer you in this particular direction, and you certainly 
cannot afford to spend time that should be given to 
other works on the subject, in reading the excellent 
chapters of Social Statics which do not bear upon it. 

Dr. Johnson's advice was much sounder. His maxim 
was, " When you open a book, and become interested in 
the middle of it, never stop to begin at the beginning." 
The rule is a very good one in its letter, and a much 
better one in its spirit, which clearly is that we should 



GENERAL READING. 117 

take pains to get at what we want in every book, with 
as little loss of time as possible. Himself an omnivo- 
rous reader, he knew thoroughly well the art of getting 
promptly at the kernels of all his books. 

BEADING ABOUT BOOKS. 

To be at all well-informed, one must know a good 
deal about books which he cannot possibly find time to 
read. He must know the authorship, the character, and 
history generally of vastly more books than he could 
possibly read in half a dozen lifetimes. He must know 
whence they came, what peculiar circumstances are 
connected with them, who their authors are, to what 
discussions they have given rise, what their effect upon 
the world has been, and what is their literary level. Not 
that all these things can be remembered in every case, 
or that they should be even deliberately studied in de- 
tail. But one's reading should at least have some refer- 
ence to this, and he should seek to become thus ac- 
quainted with literature as a whole. 

To this end even publishers' catalogues are not with- 
out value, particularly when they are at all full in their 
descriptions. But much better than these are well di- 
gested books about books, such as the one already re- 
ferred to.* Such a volume may be had for a trifle, and 
in addition to its value for reference, it has the ad- 
ditional merit of furnishing its reader a comprehensive 
view of literature as it is, and a well digested in- 
dex to the subject he has in hand. The reader who 
shall give a day or two to such a volume will learn what 
every person must know more or less thoroughly to be 

* The Best Beading. 



118 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

well informed — namely, what books each author has 
given to the world ; who is the author of each of the 
books we hear spoken of in conversation ; to what class 
of literature each belongs ; of what it treats, and what 
is the position assigned to it in literature by the best of 
our critics. 

He will learn, in short, the outside of literature, — he 
will have before him an excellent map of the literary 
world, and will gain from it a valuable knowledge of 
those parts of it over which he cannot travel in 
person. 

But it is not enough that he shall know this much of 
the books which he cannot hope to read. There are 
very many of the books that we have no time to read, 
about which we need to know something more than 
their titles and similar matters, and this is most readily 
accomplished by the reading of intelligent criticism. 

Of some books an elaborate review is worth reading, 
but .these, for the most part, are books which must 
themselves be read by every person who makes any 
effort to keep up with current literature, and so the briefer 
notices given in our monthly magazines of the better 
class, and even those which we find in the great metro- 
politan dailies, are of very great value as furnishing the 
information we need about the books which we have no 
time to read, but concerning which every intelligent 
man needs to know something. 

DANGEROUS READING. 

Almost any kind of reading matter, if read to the 
exclusion of everything else, becomes dangerous. It is 
never well to cultivate a one-sided mental habit. An 
intellectual diet, consisting only of poetry, even though 



GENERAL READING. 119 

the poetry be always of the best, is quite as bad as a 
physical feeding on nothing but pastry. Dyspepsia, in 
physical form, is not worse than its intellectual counter- 
part. 

This particular danger is all the greater for the reason 
that people whose tastes lead them to confine their read- 
ing largely to a single kind of literature, are always 
people whose minds need balancing in precisely the 
opposite direction. A taste so strong for poetry, or 
other ideal literature, that its possessor cares for noth- 
ing else, indicates a pressing necessity for the cultivation 
of the more practical faculties. And so it is with every 
other such leaning. ' 

The student may very properly entertain preferences 
of this kind, and he is safe enough in allowing them to 
lead him to a reasonable extent, but he should at all 
events take pains to preserve the balance which he has 
cultivated, and whenever he finds his taste leading him 
into excess in one direction, it is his business at once to 
restrain and correct it by studies of an opposite cha- 
racter. 

I have already advised the cultivation and develop- 
ment of strong points in every ease., but strong points be- 
come points of weakness if they are allowed to control 
the whole man. 

A little novel-reading may be absolutely necessary to 
the intellectual equilibrium of a metaphysical or math- 
ematical enthusiast, while there are men and women in 
whom the reading of fiction has destroyed all that there 
ever was in them of intellectual vigor, simply because 
their tendencies and tastes were all in one direction, 
and no care was taken to turn them in any other. 

I cannot too strongly impress upon the student the 



120 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUESELF. 

necessity of guarding himself against all such clangers. 
He should know himself as thoroughly as possible, that 
he may know and supply his own intellectual wants ; 
but above all, he should see to it that his reading is va- 
ried in its character, and that his changes of intellect- 
ual food are not left to caprice or chance. He should 
read some novels, certainly ; a good deal of poetry, 
without doubt ; some speculative literature ; a good 
deal of biography, and more of history. If any one 
class of books please him above the rest, he will cer- 
tainly read enough of that, but he should take good 
care that its precise opposite receives a full share of at- 
tention. 

There is one other danger which comes to every 
reader. We must all read the newspapers, of course; 
) mt to read even one large paper entirely through every 
lay requires a considerable expenditure of time. Now 
the truth is, that unless one reads newspapers in the 
way of business there is very little in one that any one 
person needs to read. There may be nothing in the 
paper that should be omitted from it— nothing which 
will not meet the wants of some reader ; but at the 
same time the parts that any single individual needs 
more than he needs the time it would take to read 
them, are very few and very small. Every reader 
should learn to find these readily, and he should read 
nothing else in the paper. 

The head-lines and the typographical peculiarities of 
the several parts will enable an attentive reader to see 
at a glance what he wants and can afford to read ; but 
curiosity or carelessness leads nearly all of us to read 
vastly more of our newspapers than this, to the great 
wasting of very valuable time. A little care will ena- 



GENERAL READING. 121 

ble the student to avoid this, and avoid it he must, if he 
would economize his time properly. 

In the reading of magazines and literary papers there 
is a similar danger, though it exists in much smaller de- 
gree, inasmuch as these are more strictly literary in 
their character, and have therefore no occasion to sup- 
ply matter of no use to the majority of readers. 

A SCHEDULE OF READING-MATTER. 

I have already said that set courses of reading are 
usually valueless, and that it is no part of my purpose 
to supply anything of the kind. But in carrying out 
the plan I have suggested, of properly apportioning 
the different kinds of reading, it will be convenient for 
the student to keep in mind some distinct classification 
of literature, more or less elaborate, according to cir- 
cumstances. 

In a general way, the following will answer very well 
as a basis for such a classification as will be found 
necessary : 

History, Physical Science, 

Biography, Poetry,, 

Philosophy, Piction , 

Travels and Explorations, Specialties : ( Theology, 

Law, inything professional.) 
The comparative value and importance of these seve- 
ral classes of literature is an indeterminate one, and 
it varies with the wants, the temperament, the capabili- 
ties, and the circumstances of each student. 

In a general way, where there are no circumstances 
making one of these more important than the others, 
and where the object is simply the improvement of the 
reader, some attention should be given to each, and the 



122 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

bent of the reader will ordinarily indicate which should 
enter most largely into the course. 

For most readers History (including philosophical 
essays on historical subjects) should form the larger 
part of the course, inasmuch as it supplies at once a 
vast stock of information, and an equally large share of 
culture . 

NOVEL BEADING, 

In point of fact, there will ordinarily be more fiction 
read than anything else. In our day we have stories 
and stories, and without entering into any discussion 
whatever of the merits of novel-reading, I may safe- 
ly say that most people read too much fiction, and 
certainly a large part of the fictitious literature of 
the day — even after excluding all of the trash — is 
without any especial value to the reader, while the time 
its perusal occupies greatly limits the amount of other 
reading possible. 

My advice to the student is, to read about half of 
Dickens's novels ; one or two of George Eliot's ; one or 
two of Bulwer's best ; most of Scott's — these being his- 
tory as much as anything else; — Vanity Fair, and one or 
two others of Thackeray's ; a few of the older Eng- 
lish novels of standard reputation, with one or two of 
the best of our American books of the sort. 

There are many others absorbingly interesting and 
without positively objectionable characteristics of any 
kind, but life is too short for the reading even of all the 
good novels in print — particularly if the reader wishes to 
do anything else in the world. 

Such a list as the one given above, will occupy as 
large a portion of time as most of us can afford to give 



GENERAL HEADING. 123 

to novel-reading, and the man who has read all, or 
nearly all, the books mentioned, is as well read in the 
matter of novels as anybody needs to be, unless his 
reading is very extensive, in which case a larger amount 
of fiction would be well enough. A healthful propor- 
tion is what we should aim to maintain. 

But these should not be read at the beginning of the 
course, nor should any considerable number of them be 
read consecutively. It is best first to form a taste for 
something less exciting, and to avoid impairing that 
taste afterwards, by an injudicious amount of novel- 
reading at any one time. 

THE BEADING OF HISTORY. 

I have before me, as I write, a letter from a young- 
man who says that his education thus far has been 
mainly self-conducted, and that having completed his 
text-book study, he wishes now to become a well- 
read man. To this end he understands that he must 
know something of history, and he writes to ascertain 
how much of history is necessary, " for," continues the 
letter, " I want to read just as little of dry chronicles as 
I can get on with." 

How the case of this young man is not an exceptional 
one by any means. He will never be even a tolerably 
well-informed person, as a matter of course, unless InX 
ideas shall undergo a radical change, which is hardly 
probable. But there are two or three mistakes which 
he makes in common with many other people, and his 
case furnishes me an opportunity to correct them in the 
minds of more hopeful students. 

In the first place it is no less a mistake to suppose 
that intelligence may be gotten by an indolent, shirking 



124 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

system of reading, than to imagine that text-books will 
yield their treasures to the careless and listless student. 
The man who begins a course of reading with the wish 
to make it as meagre as possible, is not likely ever to 
make it of any great value to himself. It is only those 
who hunger after information that manage to digest it, 
and the desire and the purpose must be stronger than 
they seem to be in the mind of my correspondent, be- 
fore there can be reasonable hope that they will bring 
about anything like satisfactory results. 

There are cases in which the student feels, at first, 
but little pleasure in reading, but resolutely pursues his 
course from a strong desire to profit by his labor, and 
to such the pleasure soon comes to strengthen the 
purpose. But when the purpose itself is weak, and no 
pleasure is felt in the self-imposed task, a vague wish 
to be well informed, or to appear so, is not sufficient to 
keep the man at his work, and he might almost as well 
abandon the purpose in the outset. 

A second error is the assumption that history is a 
matter of dry chronicling. It is a series of chronicles, 
of course, but so is every novel, for that matter. The 
events in the one case are real, and in the other imagi- 
nary, and this far history has the advantage. There is 
less of unity in history than in fiction, but as a 
whole, the former is no less startlingly dramatic than 
the latter, and to a healthful taste there is quite as 
much of absorbing interest in true stories of men's 
deeds as in fictitious ones. 

While we are upon the subject of historical reading, 
let me add a few suggestions which may be of service. 

Compends of history are almost worthless as original 
reading. To bring them within the required limits it 



GENEBAL BEADING. 125 

becomes necessary to eliminate nearly everything of 
value from the narration, and that which is left is but 
the merest skeleton of the tale they are intended to tell. 
It is not possible to learn history from books of this 
sort, and as histories they are worthless. They are to 
history just what epitomes of English literature are to 
English literature in its fullness, and properly used 
they have their value, just as these have theirs in their 
proper spheres. 

It is a very good plan, after the student has complet- 
ed an extended course of history, either general or spe- 
cial, to take up an abridgment or brief compend, cover- 
ing the same ground. By this means the course which 
has been read will be easily reviewed, and the student 
will have at a single glance a comprehensive view of the 
whole course over which he has travelled. This is the 
use, and almost the only good use to which brief histo- 
rical compends can be put. 

I have already pointed out the necessity of reading 
both sides in history, as in everything else. I must 
also caution the student against a habit of accepting 
authority on historical matters unquestioningly. 

Passion, prejudice, circumstances of all kinds, enter 
largely into the telling of the world's story, and he 
who would get at the truth must weigh carefully the 
probabilities in every doubtful case, and make due al- 
lowance for all these in making up his opinions. 

But aside from the fact that such a practice is neces- 
sary to the discovery of truth, it is even more import- 
ant as a habit of mind tending to healthful culture. It 
exercises the judgment and it cultivates a wholesome 
habit of doubting and investigating, the value of which 
can hardly be over-estimated. 



126 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUKSELE. 

In reading history it is well to remember that specu- 
lative essays upon historical subjects are quite as im- 
portant a part of history as the narrative itself, and it 
is an excellent plan to follow every course of history 
proper with the best essays to be had upon the events 
or the men involved. 

These sometimes take the shape of biographies— - 
sometimes they appear as book reviews, and sometimes 
they come to us professing to be just what they are. 
But whatever their shape, they are peculiarly valuable. 
They furnish at once a brief review of the history read, 
and a thoughtful commentary upon it. 

POETKY. 

In reading poetry, the especial purpose, aside from 
amusement, is the cultivation of aesthetic feeling. To 
cultivate this worthily it is necessary that everything be 
avoided which will tend to warp the taste or to make 
it one-sided. To a great extent we read poetry 
only for the sake of the amusement it affords, and to 
that extent our selection is dictated by our tastes, but it 
is well enough to let the judgment have some control 
even here. I have known ill results to follow from the 
too exclusive reading of the works of a single poet 
or a single school of poets, and this is the fault against 
which I would especially caution the reader. 

We need nothing so much as catholicity, both of 
opinion and taste, and this can be secured only by 
careful culture. 

Especially is this true in matters of literary taste. 
We not only need to know what different poets have 
written, and their several characteristics, but we need, 
quite as imperatively, to so far cultivate a catholicity of 



GENERAL READING. 127 

taste that we can appreciate the merits and the beauties 
of each. Our reading of poetry, whether it be a 
limited or an extensive one, should in any event em- 
brace as large a variety as possible. There are people 
who appreciate Byron, and Scott, and Shelley, or 
Pope, and Dryden, and there are others who love 
Wordsworth, and Longfellow, and Tennyson. Very 
much smaller is the class of people who love and appre- 
ciate all of these and others, but these few are they who 
see more of beauty in each than the special lovers of 
each will ever see there, and who are able to set down 
every singer at his proper valuation. 

With this sole caution, I say to the reader, follow the 
bent of your own taste in the matter of poetry, just as 
you would in regard to pictures, or any other creations 
of art. Let your taste be your chief guide in matters of 
taste, but take care to cultivate it judiciously, in order 
that it may be a safe and competent guide. 

BIOGRAPHY, ETC. 

Biography, Travels, Explorations, and similar mat- 
ters are, to a great extent, but history in another form. 
The story of a leading man's life is the story of his 
times. Travels and explorations usually contribute to 
history, past or present, more than to anything else, and 
the accounts given of them by the traveller are histories 
in themselves. 

In a general way, what has been said in regard to the 
study of history applies equally to the reading of books 
of this sort, except that it should be remembered that 
biographies and books of travel are often slices of his- 
tory cut uncommonly thick. If we read an extended 
biography of any but the very foremost man of his 



128 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

age, we may be devoting to a small segment of the 
world's history an amount of time wholly out of pro- 
portion to its relative importance. And the same thing 
is true of other books of this class. 

As a rule, therefore, it is best to avoid merely histo- 
rical biographies as a part of historical reading where 
their subject was not pre-eminently the foremost man 
of his age — where his story is not wholly the story of 
his time in some respect. 

There is another trouble with biographies, which 
should be borne constantly in mind while they are in 
reading, and that is, that the personal element enters 
very largely into their composition. Men who write 
biographies do so, very generalry, for the purpose of 
exalting or depreciating the man who forms the subject 
of their work, or to do the same thing for some mea- 
sure with which his life was in some way interwoven. 
They write the man's life because they greatly admire 
or particularly detest him or his theories, or because 
they wish to advance some particular end, or for some 
other reason equally fatal to fairness. Whether con- 
scious of it or not, the writers of this kind of biogra- 
phies almost always occupy the position of an advocate 
rather than that of a judge, and this is not the way in 
which history should be written. 

There are, of course, exceptions to this, but they are 
the exceptions merely, and not the rule, and what I 
would urge upon the student is the necessity of taking 
care to give this personal element its full weight in de- 
termining the value of conclusions drawn from books 
of this class. 

On the other hand, however, it must be remembered 
that biography is, to very many people, the most at- 



GENEEAL EEADING. 129 

tractive form in which history can be put, and hence its 
usefulness, as mere history, is very great. 

Again, there are biographies not historical — stories of 
the liyes of men whose lives form no part of public his- 
tory. These are close studies of human development, 
and form an admirable department of reading by them- 
selves. To these, what I have said of merely histori- 
cal biography does not apply at all, and to some extent 
all written lives of individual men partake of this ex- 
cellent quality, when the work is at all well done, and 
from this point of view biography has a value wholly 
apart from its worth as history. 

DICTIONARIES AS READING-MATTER. 

The book must be a very bad, or an extremely poor 
one, which has nothing in it worth reading, when there 
is nothing better at hand. 

There are so many books which we need to read 
and cannot for want of time, that very many good ones 
must be left unread, so that we may have time for 
the ones most imperatively, necessary to us. Compara- 
tively there are vast numbers of books not worth the 
reading, — positively there are very few, except the 
trashy ones known as sensational novels. 

That is to say, there are very few books which 
are not well worth the reading when there are no bet- 
ter ones at hand, and so there will come times to every 
one of us when we can take up and read books which 
we should never select where there is room for selection, 
but which are in themselves worth the reading. It is a 
good rule never to be caught anywhere without a 
good supply of reading- matter, but very few of us live 
strictly up to it. The next best thing is to know how 



130 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

to make the most of such literature as we can get when 
our choice is a very limited one under stress of circum- 
stance. 

I remember a strongly illustrative case in point. 
I spent nearly a week once in a little village in Ten- 
nessee, during a rainy season, when walking out of doors 
was simply out of the question. The only books to be 
had at all were the Children of the Abbey, Tupper's Pro- 
verbial Philosophy, and about one half of an old John- 
son's Dictionary. 

Doubtless I might have got something out of Tupper, 
and possibly a vague shadow of amusement out of the 
Children of the Abbey, but the old Dictionary was 
by odds the most promising of the three, and I read 
it for five consecutive days, making some curious word- 
studies in which I became greatly interested. From 
that day to this, I have never been at a loss for some- 
thing to read in any house containing a dictionary, and 
I strongly commend all dictionaries and books of that 
kind as reading matter of a very interesting and 
instructive character. Their value as books of reference 
is not their only value by any means, even if this be 
their chief use. It will pay to go through an unabridged 
Webster or Worcester once or twice at least during a 
lifetime, not reading everything in it by any means, 
but picking out here and there the things one wants. 

Still more interesting is a biographical dictionary, or 
the dictionary of some technical specialty, if the spe- 
cialty be one in which the reader feels an interest, and 
a good encyclopedia is always a treasure. Not that 
anybody should think of reading any one of these 
regularly through, or taking it up as set task -work. 
But there are odd times when we have nothing else at 



GENERAL READING. 131 

hand, or when we care for nothing else for the moment, 
and at such times one cannot do better than to turn the 
leaves of a good dictionary, or encyclopedia, in search 
of something which will strike the fancy. 



CHAPTEK IX. 

MOW TO STUDY AND READ TO THE BEST ADVANTAGE. 

A good many of the suggestions I shall give in this 
concluding chapter follow as corollaries from the teach- 
ings already given. Some of them are but recapitula- 
tions of the suggestions scattered through former chap- 
ters ; others have found no place there. 

They are grouped together here for the sake of the 
student's convenience, and because they constitute a 
fitting conclusion to my little book. 

A PRACTICAL EDUCATION. 

The end to be aimed at in every case should, of 
course, be the securing of as wide and perfect and com- 
plete a culture as possible, and the acquisition of as 
much information as the limits of time and opportunity 
will allow. 

We have already seen that the perfect, ideal educa- 
tion is that which completely and perfectly develops the 
man, bringing all his faculties into full play, and sup- 
plying each with all the information necessary to its 
very best work. 

Practically the best education to be secured is one 
which falls far short of this, and the best educated peo- 



HOW TO STUDY AND READ. 133 

pie we have are those who know some one thing thor- 
oughly, and have a general acquaintance with others. 
Practically, this should be the object aimed at by every 
student, and it should constitute the basis of all his 
work. But in projecting and pursuing a course of 
study and reading with this end in view, there is always 
the danger of giving to the one thing too great a share 
of attention, and so failing to accomplish the equally 
important purpose of making one's self acquainted 
generally with other branches of human knowledge. 
This danger comes to every student, and it cannot be 
too carefully avoided. 

ECONOMY OF TIME. 

Every student whose purpose is in any way a worthy 
one, will find his time far less abundant than he could 
wish, and therefore it becomes especially necessary that 
he shall economize it carefully ; and there are many 
ways in which this may be done. 

Whenever a book is taken up, whether for study as a 
text-book or only for reading, the purpose it is to serve 
and the limits of its capacity to serve that purpose, 
should be distinctly recognized. The student should 
ask himself—" Why do I want this book ? What can 
it give me ? How much of it is worth more to me than 
the -time I must give to its reading?" He should 
always remember that no book yields anything gratis ; 
that he pays, in the coin of precious time, for every- 
thing he gets out of books, and that it is the worst 
kind of extravagance to read any book, or any part of 
any book, which does not yield to the reader something 
of more value to him than is the time given to the 



134 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUESELF. 

reading. We cannot afford to read even good books 
when there are better or more necessary ones awaiting 
our attention. And this is equally true of parts of 
books. By a little attention to this the student will 
save a great deal of time. When he shall have read as 
much of a book as he can afford to read, let him drop 
it at once, in order that he may have time for others. 

A great deal of time is wasted, too, by a habit of in- 
attention, and the student should take the utmost care 
to avoid the formation of such a habit, or to cure it if 
it is already formed. It is easy enough to do this, if 
only the purpose be strong enough. You have only to 
begin with very short terms of study, letting them 
be as frequent in their recurrence as possible. Whenever 
your attention shall flag, make an effort to keep it hxed, 
and the moment you shall And yourself unable to control 
it longer, cease to study. Take a walk, work in your gar- 
den, or do something else which will rest your mind, and 
after a brief period of physical exertion, return to your 
studies. With every return you will be able to fix your 
attention for a longer period than before, and your ha- 
bit will soon be cured. 

It is always bad to go on reading when the mind is 
occupied with something else. Such a practice fixes 
upon the mind and the eye a habit of separate action, 
which soon becomes chronic, and the habit is fatal to 
profitable reading. 



WHAT TO DO WITH THE MEMORY. 

There is a good deal of nonsense talked, concerning 
the cultivation of the memory, and a good deal of harm 
done in attempts to develop it abnormally, as well as 



HOW TO STUDY AND READ. 135 

in making a misuse of it in the study of matters with 
the real learning of which it has very little to do. 

Paradoxical as it may seem, prodigious memories are 
by no means very rare. " Lightning calculators " have 
been known almost as long as arithmetic, although they 
have rarely been men who really knew arithmetic, mar- 
vellous as their power of conjuring with figures has 
always appeared to be to the gaping crowd. The world 
has always had people whose memories were next to 
marvellous in their extent and power, and we always 
shall have them so long as the fact shall remain that 
almost any person may, if he will, make his memory re- 
ceive and retain everything, or nearly everything, given 
to it. 

There is nothing easier than the development of a 
prodigious memory, and there is no faculty of the mind 
so little worthy of such extreme cultivation. 

I once knew a lecturer who vaunted his memory and 
its performances, as the most marvellous thing with 
which he was acquainted. He told his audiences how 
he could not only repeat the Bible from beginning to 
end, but also give the chapter and verse of any portion 
if repeated in his presence. He could repeat, also, 
every conceivable detail of minute geographical fact, 
and do half a hundred other utterly useless things. 

The man was a fool ; but any person of good ordi- 
nary capacity can learn all that he learned, by giving 
as he did a lifetime to the task. The trouble is that the 
price is worth so much more than the commodity. 

But while all this is true, it is also true that a good, 
trustworthy memory is of very great service, and such 
a memory is well worth cultivating, within reason- 
able limits. 



136 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURaELF. 



HOW TO CULTIVATE THE MEMOEY. 

If we wish to develop the muscles of any particular 
part of our bodies, we proceed to exercise those mus- 
cles moderately and regularly. It is only by exercise 
that we can hope to strengthen and improve them. 

With the faculties of the mind we do precisely the 
same thing. If we wish to reason closely and accu- 
rately, we must constantly exercise the reasoning facul- 
ties. If we wish to develop the mathematical powers of 
our minds, we must make daily use of mathematical 
exercises. Now, in this respect, the memory does not 
differ from the other intellectual faculties, except that 
its proper cultivation is rather easier than that of most 
others. 

To secure a good memory, therefore^ it is only neces- 
sary that the student shall exercise it systematically, 
and we are all doing this every day in a greater or less 
degree. 

We must, however, avoid things which tend to im- 
pair the faculty, of which there are several worthy of 
mention. 

THINGS THAT IMPAIR THE MEMORY 

Inattention is the first and greatest cause of bad 
memories, and there was a deal of force in Lord By- 
ron's remark, that he had forgotten his Latin and 
Greek, " if a man may be said to have forgotten that 
which he never remembered." 

The way in which this habit of inattention is most 
commonly cultivated is in the careless reading of mat- 
ters of no importance, — newspaper paragraphs, items, 



HOW TO STUDY AND READ. I37 

detached thoughts,-any thing which makes no impres- 
sion on the reader. The reading of such things gene- 
rates a habit of careless, inattentive reading which is 
often fatal to anything like a good memory. 

The same is true of many other things, which will 
readily suggest themselves to the reader, whose mle it 
should be, if his memory be defective, never to do any- 
thing carelessly or inattentively — even though the 
thing done be in itself unworthy of a better doino- 

Many people find that while they remember* some 
things perfectly, they are apt to forget just the ones they 
most want to remember. This arises in a large degree 
from the total absence of system which is so common in 
matters of memory. Even people who carefully classify 
and arrange their learning for all other purposes often 
omit wholly to do this for the memory, reading and 
studying laboriously, but leaving it altogether to chance 
what things acquired from the reading and the study 
shall be remembered, and what forgotten. That this 
is the common practice I think there can be no doubt, 
but it is certainly a singularly bad one. 

We all know that we can remember any given 
thing by "fixing it in the memory "as the phrase has 
it,— that is to say, we are all conscious that the memory 
may be greatly aided by the formation of a deliberate 
purpose to remember. Now it is clearly impossible that 
we shall make such a deliberate effort for the retention 
of every fact and every principle we meet in our study 
reading and observation, and the obvious conclusion is 
that we should make some classification of these facts 
and principles, so that we may select those which are 
most important and make an especial effort to retain 



J 38 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUBSELF. 

them. A good classification for this purpose is the 
following : 

To be remembered. 

To be held ready for reference when wanted. 

Not wante further. 

Under the first head should come all those things 
which it is not worth while to remember in detail ; 
under the second, all those which we need only to 
remember generally, while we remember just where they 
may be found when wanted in detail ; under the third, 
of course, should come everything not worth a special 
effort of the memory, though many of them will be use- 
ful, if remembered without such special effort, 

A very fruitful source of failure in attempts to culti- 
vate the memory is the common mistake of confound- 
ing the husk with the grain, and learning to retain 
words rather than the ideas they express. There are 
many people who readily commit the words of a book 
to memory whenever they choose, but who after reading 
a volume find it very difficult to remember anything of 
its contents, except the passages which have been me- 
morized absolutely. Such memories are provokingly 
worthless, and yet there are teachers in plenty who 
take pains to cultivate just such in their pupils. 

As a rule, the exact phraseology of a book is never 
worth remembering, either in whole or in considerable 
part, and ordinarily it is a waste of time to commit 
words to memory ; but the mental habit of the stu- 
dent is a very defective one if he fails to retain, in a 
general way, the ideas of every book read. 

In this, as in every other case, it is the thoughts and 
not the mere words — the kernels and not the shells — 
that are wanted, and in cultivating the memory, the 



HOW TO STUDY AND READ. 139 

student needs to look sharply to his processes, lest he 
cultivate it in the wrong direction. Let him remember 
that while every faculty is developed by exercise, each 
is developed strongly in the particular direction in 
which the exercise points, and that it is therefore espe- 
cially requisite that he shall make the exercise of his 
memory a healthful one in kind as well as in amount. 

MEMORANDUM BOOKS, ETC. 

Memorandum books and other mechanical contri- 
vances are often useful and sometimes very . necessary, 
but they are susceptible of abuse and capable of work- 
ing great injury to the memory they are meant to 
serve. When anything is to be remembered it is so 
convenient to jot down a note of it, that the plan is of- 
ten resorted to where the memory itself should be 
trusted, and the habit of relying upon memoranda ra- 
ther than upon the memory itself, is often fatal to the 
proper development of that faculty. 

In giving a special caution thus against the abuse of 
memorandum books, I do so only because these are the 
commonest forms of artificial aids to memory, but what 
I say of these is equally true of every other device of 
the kind, and there are many of them in use. The 
rule should be the same in all cases, and it should be to 
use mechanical aids as little as possible, and to carefully 
observe their effects upon the memory, in order that 
they may not be allowed to sap it unawares. 

I have found it a good plan in my own case, to make 
memoranda aids to memory, rather than substitutes for 
it. Let me explain what I mean a little more fully. 
When I particularly wish to remember any isolated 
fact or other thing, I have no difficulty in doing so, by 



140 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUKSELF. 

simply determining that I will. But when I have to 
collect and remember a considerable number of things 
for future classification and use, (as, for instance, when 
collecting and arranging in my mind the materials for 
an essay or a book,) the unaided memory is not suffi- 
cient, and so a resort to memorandum books must be 
had. In these I jot down brief notes of the things I 
wish to use, making a rude classification of them as 
they occur to me from day to day. When this is done 
I lay the note-books away, and have no occasion what- 
ever to refer to the memoranda in using the material 
collected. The act of making a written note of any- 
thing serves to fix the thing in my memory, and ordin- 
arily I have no further use for the note after it is once 
made. 

Now, I do not put this forward as a plan for others' 
following. Perhaps to most of my readers my contri- 
vances of this sort would be worthless, while others 
which would work well with them would be of no ser- 
vice to me. In ail such matters every man is and 
must be a law unto himself, and in giving my own plan 
to the reader I offer it only as a suggestion which may 
possibly point the way to some device of his own 
which will similarly serve his purpose. 

And just here a general caution is necessary against 
all attempts to adopt other people's plans in matters of 
this and like sorts. Nearly all young people try to 
follow some other person's lead in such matters, and in 
doing so they almost always fail because the processes 
of different minds are different. 

The only safe course is to let the working rules of 
other people serve as suggestions for processes adapted 
to your own wants and your own peculiarities. 



HOW TO STUDY AND READ. 141 

And whatever your processes of intellectual work 
may be, above everything else avoid making your rules 
or those of other people your masters. They are of 
service only while they serve, and the moment they 
assume control over the man, they become tyrants of a 
particularly objectionable sort. 

MECHANICAL MEMOKY. 

The student will almost certainly meet, sooner or 
later, with systems of mechanical memory, — elaborate 
contrivances by which to remember mechanically 
whatever one wishes to remember without any culti- 
vation of the faculty involved. These systems often 
contain a few good suggestions for use in the com- 
paratively limited number of cases in which it is possible 
and desirable to remember things mechanically ; but as 
systems they are worthless, always, of necessity, and to 
make any attempt to master one of them is to simply 
throw away time. They are worthless, in the first 
place, because of their very elaborateness, which makes 
it a more difficult task to master them than it would be 
to cultivate the memory itself to a far greater degree of 
precision than the systems can justly claim. In the 
second place, with all their seeming completeness, they 
usually fail just where they are needed most. Thirdly, 
it is generally more difficult to remember their de- 
vices for remembering things than it would be 
to remember the things themselves. But, after all, the 
chief difficulty with all these systems lies in the fact 
that they aim only at the recollection of words, — 
they deal only with the husks of knowledge, and hence 
are inherently unworthy. 



142 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 



HOW MUCH TO BEAD. 

Students are often led to inquire how much they 
should read within a month or a year, and answers of 
all sorts have been given to the question. 

In this as in other matters of a similar nature it is 
impossible to give an estimate worth anything, or one 
which will be even approximately correct in a majority 
of cases. 

The general principle is, that we should not read 
more than we can digest ; but what would be a surfeit 
for one intellect is wholly insufficient for the ordinary 
food of another. Moreover, it is difficult for the reader 
to discover just how perfectly or imperfectly he has 
assimilated his intellectual food. 

Again, we ma}' store the mind to-day with information 
to be digested long hence, and the fact that we have 
not yet made positive use of all that we have read is not 
proof that we have read too much. 

In point of fact, very few people read too much. 
Most of us read far too little, and the student need 
have very little apprehension on the score of an intel- 
lectual surfeit. The appetite is in this case a pretty 
safe guide, and in a very large majority of cases it may 
be freely indulged, as to amount, without any kind 
of danger, if only the reading be of a proper sort. 

WHEN TO READ. 

" Is it best to have fixed times at which to read ?" 
asks a young man in a letter now lying before me, 
I answer Yes, and No.. 
It is certainly best to have fixed times for reading if, 



HOW TO STUDY AND BEAD. 143 

without them, the reading is likely to be neglected to 
any considerable extent. It is best to have rules for 
your own guidance and control if you need them. Other- 
wise, certainly not. 

It is no small part of education to learn to govern 
one's self, but that self-government which accomplishes 
its purpose with the smallest amount of law is best. 
Government is necessary in every case, but the freer it 
can have its subject the better it will be for him. 

In all matters of this sort, therefore, the student 
should proceed as best he can, taking care first that his 
duties to himself in the matter of study and reading are 
fully and fairly performed, and secondly, that he remains 
as largely a free agent as is consistent with the accom- 
plishment of this end. He should make rules for him- 
self, and enforce them strictly too, if rules are necessary 
to him, but if he can perform all his duties to himself 
without limitations of this kind, it will be far better not 
to hedge himself about with self-imposed and unneces- 
sary statutes. 

THE PROPER TIME OF DAY FOR READING AND STUDY. 

As to what is the proper time of day for intellectual 
work of any kind, opinions differ largely among people 
who have strong prejudices or preferences in the matter 
— each thinking that his own favorite time is in every 
way the best. 

. Probably habit has as much to do with it as anything 
else, in most cases ; and surrounding circumstances or- 
dinarily determine the question for all of us. 

Except that the health should be carefully guarded, 
the best possible rule, doubtless, is to do your reading 



144 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

and studying when you can do it best — in the morning 
— at night-— or at whatever other time you find to be 
the best in your own case. 

It is important, however, to learn to read, to study 
and to write quite as well in the midst of interruptions 
as anywhere else. This anybody may learn to do with 
a little practice, and it is well worth the learning, even 
to people who have abundant and uninterrupted lei- 
sure. 

THOUGHT STUDY. 

During all our waking hours we are thinking of 
something. The moment we cease to think, we are 
asleep. 

This fact is well enough known to everybody, but its 
lesson is not always learned. We go on thinking, 
thinking, thinking, but how many of us make a system- 
atic effort to so control our thoughts as to make them of 
value to us ? 

When we walk in the streets, or ride in the cars, or 
do anything else which leaves our minds free, we are 
very apt to let them run on listlessly from one subject 
to another without care, and the result is that all our 
thinking — all this wearing labor of our brains produces 
nothing of any value to us, except it be by accident. 

But this loss of intellectual labor is not the only ill 
result of allowing the thoughts to run riot among tri- 
vialities. We need to form habits of self-control. Such 
habits constitute at least half of culture, and their ex- 
istence is absolutely necessary to the accomplishment of 
anything like satisfactory educational results. We 
must control our intellectual operations, if we would 
train our intellects to satisfactory and systematic activ- 



HOW TO STUDY AND BEAD. 145 

ity, and there is nothing so fatal to such control as is 
this habit of loose, unguided, random thinking. 

The mind must have rest, of course, but the rest 
comes from change and from sleep — not from uncon- 
trolled and useless activity. For these reasons I 
strongly urge upon the student the habit of thought- 
study, as it is sometimes called. Let him always have 
some subject or other ready for consideration, and when 
nothing else offers, let him think about that, taking care 
that his thinking shall be systematic. Let him also 
cultivate the habit of self-control to such an extent that 
he may dismiss one subject and take up another at will. 
Then let him question everything about him for inform- 
ation and for culture. He will soon find that he can 
learn quite as much from men and things as from 
books. 

As a rule, it is better that we should observe the men 
and the things about us, and think of them, than that 
we abstract ourselves, and hence it is best to keep the 
chosen subject in reserve so long as there are other 
things at hand to furnish food for thought. This habit 
of observing our surroundings and thinking about 
them furnishes us the very best possible object-lessons, 
and it is this very habit which has resulted in some of 
the greatest of human achievements. A very simple 
thing indeed, to furnish food for thought, is a tea-kettle 
lid, but because James Watt, when he saw it, thought 
about it, we have now our steam-engine, and this one 
man's habit of object-study advanced the civilization of 
the world incalculably. History is full of just such 
illustrations, and if we could always trace these things 
accurately, we shoulcl almost certainly find that every 
man who accomplishes anything of moment to himself 



146 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

or to the world, owes his success to habits of this char- 
acter. 

There are other mental habits, some to be cultivated 
and some to be shunned, and these for the most part 
will suggest themselves and sufficiently indicate their 
natures to the student who takes himself in hand for 
training. One or two of them, however, may be men- 
tioned 

It is a good plan to doubt and investigate. Doubt 
is the forerunner of wisdom, and there is no worse 
habit of mind than that which prompts the easy ac- 
ceptance of professed facts without proof. Authority 
is only good in so far as it is authority, and it should 
be accepted no farther. When I read in my chemistry 
that oxygen, hydrogen and carbon are elementary sub- 
tances, the authority of the eminent chemist who tells 
me this is sufficient to convince me that this is a cor- 
rect statement of the fact so far as the fact is under- 
stood by the chemists, but in holding myself ready to 
believe that all these substances ■ may after all be com- 
pounds, and may ultimately be discovered to be such, 
I only do precisely what the chemists themselves do, 
and what they must of necessity do if they hope to 
make any new discoveries in their science. An unrea- 
soning and dogmatic skepticism is as bad as an unrea- 
soning credulity, but the habit of holding the mind 
open to conviction, and the habit of questioning every- 
thing for the sake of learning more about it are cer- 
tainly exceedingly valuable ones. 

Just here it is necessary to caution the reader 
against a bad habit into which a good many people 
fall, and that is the habit of accepting the statement of 
a puzzling fact and trying to account* for it before as- 



HOW TO STUDY AND READ. 147 

certaining that the fact is as it is stated, or in any 
other way beginning at the wrong end of an investiga- 
tion. 

There is an old story of a puzzling question as to 
why a living fish put into a vessel of water does not 
add to the weight of the whole. A good deal of 
speculation was had on the subject and many ingenious 
theories advanced by way of explanation. I believe it 
was Dr. Franklin who solved it, by first putting a liv- 
ing fish into a vessel of water to learn whether or not 
the assumption on which the question was based was a 
true one. 

The Patent Office at Washington is full of failures 
which have consumed men's lives in the making, and 
in nine cases out of ten they are failures only because 
their inventors omitted to examine and verify the terms 
of the problems they tried to solve. 

Every sleight of hand juggler depends upon this habit 
of men's minds for success in his deceptions. He sets 
people to puzzling over seeming facts which are not 
facts at all, and they, having begun at the wrong end of 
their investigations, might continue them till doomsday 
without coming a step nearer to the' truth of which 
they are in search. 

I have sometimes amused myself testing the question 
of how nearly universal this habit is. There is an ab- 
surdly simple trick with cards, which ought to deceive 
nobody, and yet it will deceive about eight people out of 
every ten, even when bunglingly performed. It is to 
arrange a pack of cards with the three spot of any suite 
at the bottom, and then to give the person with whom 
you are experimenting the ace of that suite, bidding him 
slip it into the pack as it lies, face downwards, on the 



148 HOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. 

table. When he shall have done this, take up the pack, 
hold its face toward you, place your two thumbs over 
two of the three spots on the card next to you, blow, or 
say something, and exhibit the ace at the bottom of the 
pack. Every intelligent man must know that this card 
which he sees cannot possibly be the ace which he has 
just slipped into another place, and yet I have seen this 
simple trick performed over and over again in the pres- 
ence of intelligent men and women, every one of whom 
would set about finding out how it was done, not one of 
them ever thinking to inquire whether or not it really 
was done. 

Now, this is precisely what we all do every day to a 
greater or less extent, and as the habit greatly interferes 
with successful investigation in daily life, I have thought 
it worthy of notice in this place. 

THE APPORTIONMENT OE TIME. 

A great deal of advice has been wasted on the subject 
of apportionment of time between study, work, sleep, 
etc. We all remember Dr. Franklin's dictum on the 
subject, and we all see various modifications of it in the 
newspapers now and then. 

Now if there were no other reason for saying that 
none of these prearranged schedules are worth anything, 
we should find amply sufficient justification for such a 
remark in the fact that hardly any two people agree as 
to the proportions to be maintained. Dr. Franklin 
thought six hours sleep per day enough for a man ; but 
Mr. Beecher, who does quite as much work, probably, 
as Dr. Franklin did, sleeps, we are told, twelve hoars 
out of twenty-four ordinarily, and never denies himself 
an additional " forty winks" when he wants them. 



HOW TO STUDY AND READ. 149 

The fact seems to be that in this, as in everything else, 
men differ materially from each other. Some require 
more sleep than others, just as some require more food. 
Some can stand many hours of continuous labor, while 
others must have frequent spells of resting. 

The only good rule in such a case is for each student 
to be a law unto himself. There is no extravagance so 
disastrous as the economy which denies to the student 
any needed sleep, whether the term allotted to perfect 
rest be four hours or twelve. Get all the sleep you 
need, — eat as much as you want, — and never continue 
your studies so long at a sitting as to leave yourself with 
a prostrated, worn-out feeling, as the result. 

Of course I do not advise unlimited self-indulgence. 
We must be masters of ourselves, both in body and 
mind, if we would accomplish anything in life. Beason 
must be our guide, and reason should always hold su- 
premacy over impulse. But if we wish to get the full- 
est measure of work out of an animal, we take care that 
he has rest enough and food enough to repair all waste. 
If wo have machinery at work for us, we care for it si- 
milarly, in order that it may not wear out and cease to 
be of service. Now this is precisely what we must do 
with our bodies and minds. We must repair their 
waste places, — we must keep them in working order, and 
give them rest enough and food enough to keep up their 
strength, else they will inevitably break down, more or 
less entirely. 

Bat in the matter of rest, a good deal of time may be 
saved by a little care. Change is in itself rest, and it 
often serves the purpose better than an attempted ces- 
sation from work would. When one is greatly interest- 
ed in the work in hand, it is very often impossible to 



150 HOW TO EDUCATE YOUKSELE. 

dismiss it at once frorn^ the mind, and to simply quit 
the reading of a book is not always to rest from the 
reading. The subject is still in the mind, and the mind 
works at it quite as actively without the book as with 
it. It is always best, where this is the case, if rest is 
needed, to take up some book of a wholly different char- 
acter for a while before ceasing to read entirely, so that 
the mind may be drawn away from the matter with 
which it is wearied. 

There are many times, too, when it is not necessary 
to quit work at all — times when a simple change of 
work gives all the relief the mind needs, and a little at- 
tention to this fact will make it a great economizer of 
time. 

HOW MANY STUDIES SHOULD BE CARRIED ON AT ONCE? 

There is considerable difference of opinion as to the 
number of studies that should be pursued at once. In 
the colleges the number usually prescribed is from three 
to five, and I am certainly not prepared to say that five 
are too many or three too few ; but I have known stu- 
dents to accomplish most excellent results by taking a 
single branch and pushing it through to the end of the 
course before taking up another. I have known others 
to carry on as many as nine separate studies at once, 
doing thoroughly well in all. The result in the end 
was as good in the one case as in the other. 

Probably the safest plan is to accept the college cus- 
tom as the proper rule in the matter, and to regard 
these cases as successful exceptions. Certainly, there 
are objections to either extreme, and the more moder- 
ate three, four or live studies furnish enough of variety 
to enable the student to rest by changing from one to 



HOW TO STUDY AND READ. 151 

the other, while they do not weaken his attention by 
dividing it too much. 

After all, the student cannot do better than attend to 
the teachings of the colleges in details of this charac- 
ter, and where their practice is at all uniform it will 
generally be found to represent the best plan of pro- 
cedure even for the student without a master. 



THE END. 



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Public and Private; on Courses of Heading, etc., a Guide 

for the Librarian^ Boolibtiyer and Bookseller, 



The Classified Lists, arranged under about 500 subject-Leadings, in- 
clude all the most desirable books now to be obtained either in Great 
Britain or the United States, with the published prices annexed. 
ISnio, Paper, 90 cts. Cloth, $1.25. 

" The best work of the kind we have seen."— College Courant. 

" We know of no manual that can take its place as a guide to the selecter of a 
library."— N. Y. Independent. 

"For reference for the bookbuyer it is invaluable."— Fort Wayne Gazette. 

" Supplies a need that has long been felt."— Lyons Republican. 

" The arrangement of the volume is excellent, and a vast amount of time and money 
may be saved, and a great deal of useless and hurtful trash may be avoided by con- 
sulting it."— American Historical Record. 



II. 

FOURTH EDITION. 

VyHAT TO EAT. A Manual for the Housekeeper: 
giving a Bill of Fare for every day in the year. Paper, 
50 cts. Cloth, 75 cts. 

"Compact, suggestive, and full of good ideas."— Many Housekeepers. 

" It can hardly fail to prove a valuable aid to housekeepers who are brought to theii' 
wits' end to know what to get for the day's meals."— San Francisco Bulletin. 



III. 

FIFTH EDITION. 

5HTILL THE DOCTOR COMES ; and How to Help 
-*• Him. By George H. Hope, M.D. Revised, with 
Additions, by a New York Physician. %* A Popular guide 
in all cases of accident and sudden illness. i2mo, Paper, 30 cts. 
Cloth, 60 cts. 

"A most admirable treatise ; short, concise and practical."— Harper's Monthly. 

(Editorial.) 

" We find this an invaluable little compendium, embracing more information of use 
to bystanders in time of sickness or accident than we have ever seen put together 
before. If one will study this small book well, put it in his pocket, and follow its 
directions carefully, he will often save some poor fellow's life, when a little delay 
might cause its loss."— Athol Transcript. 

"A perfect gem for the sick-room, and should be in every family."— Venango 
Spectator. 

"Indispensable for the household."— Ulica Herald. 

TV. 

THIRD EDITION. 

C TIMULANTS AND NARCOTICS ; Medically, Philo- 
sophically, and Morally Considered. By George M. 
Beard, M.D. 121x10, Paper, 50 cts. Cloth, 75 cts. 

"Dr. Beard has given the question of stimulants the first fair discussion in moderate 
compass, that it has received in this country. * * * The book should be widely 
read."— iV. Y. Independent. 

"One of the fullest, fairest and best works ever written on the subject."— Hearth 
and Home. 

~sr. 

THIRD EDITION. 

RATING AND DRINKING. A Popular Manual of 
■^ Food and Diet in Health and Disease. By George M. 
Beard, M.D. i2mo, Paper, 50 cts. Cloth, 75 cts. 

"We can thoroughly commend this little book to every one."— N. Y. Evening Mail. 
"The best manual upon the subject we have seen."— JV. Y. World. 

"VI. 

FIFTH EDITION. 

HPHE STUDENTS' OWN SPEAKER. By Paul Reeves. 
A Manual of Oratory, comprising New Selections, 
Patriotic, Pathetic, Grave and Humorous, for home use and 
for schools. i2mo, Boards, 75 cts. Cloth, 90 cts. 

"We have never before seen a collection so admirably adapted for its purpose." 
— Cincinnati Chronicle. 

" It will be of real service to all young students of the art of oratory."— Portland 
Transcript. 

" This is an excellent Speaker." — N. Y. World. 



READY IN SEPTEMBER 

VII. 

TTOW TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. A complete Guide 

for Students, showing how to study, what to study, 

and how and what to read. It is in short a " Pocket 

Schoolmaster.'' By Geo. Gary Eggleston (Editor Hearth and 

Ho7ne). 

VIII. 

OOCIAL ECONOMY. By Prof. E. Thorold Rogers 
(Tooke Professor of Economic Science, Oxford, En- 
gland), Editor of " Smith's Wealth of Nations." Revised and 
edited for American Readers. 

This little volume gives in tlie compass of 150 pages, concise yet com, 
preliensive answers to the most important questions of Social Economy, 
The relations of men to each other, the nature of property, the meaning of 
capital, the position of the laborer, the definition of money, the work of 
government, the character of business, are all set forth with clearness and 
scientific thoroughness. The book, from its simplicity and the excellence 
of its instruction, is especially adapted for use in schools, while the 
information it contains is of value and interest to all classes of readers. 



H 



IX. 
INTS ON DRESS. By an American Woman. 

CONTENTS: 

Outline History o? Dress. Economy and Taste. 

Things Indispensable. What we Mean by Dressing Well. 

Estimates of Cost. Color, Form, Suitability. 

How and What to Buy. 

X. 

HE HOME. Where it should be, and what to put 
in it. Containing hints for the selection of a home, its 
furniture and internal arrangements, with carefully prepared 
price lists of nearly everything needed by a housekeeper, and 
numerous valuable suggestions for saving money and gaining 
comfort. By Frank R. Stockton (of Hearth and Home). 

6. P. PUTNAM & SONS, Publishers, 

4th Ave, and 23d St., New York. 



T 



PUTIAM'S POPTJLAE IISTOEIES. 

Fifteen Volumes, in uniform style, handsomely bound, in a box. 

Cloth extra.. $37.50. Half calf, $67.50. 

J^ HISTORY OF ENGLAND, from the Earliest Period to A.D. 

1871. With Special Reference to the Progress of the People in Civilization, Litera 
ture, and the Arts. By B. J. Lossing. 

Small 8vo. With three Maps. Cloth extra $2.50 ; half calf, $4.50. 

*** This comprehensive volume is intended for popular use and the family library, as well as fot 

students. It claims to be more complete in its record of the political events in British history than any 

other volume of its size— while it aims particularly to trace the progress of society in all that relates tc 

Domestic Life, to Practical Improvements, and to Literature, Science and Art. 

II. 

"WASHINGTON AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. By 

Washington Irving. 
[Condensed from his larger work, but retaining all the narrative part in Living's own language ; and 
forming a vivid picture of the events which led to the existence of the American Republic] 
Illustrated large 12mo, pp. 712. Cloth extra, $2.50 ; half calf, $4.50. 

III. 
THE TIMES OF CHARLES II. AND JAMES II. 
(i.) JJEPY'S DIARY. Large 12mo. Cloth $2.50 ; half calf, $4.50. 

(2.) "gTjVELYN'S DIARY. Large 12mo. Cloth $2.50 ; half calf, $4.50. 

IV. 

QORTES, AND THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO. By Arthue 
Helps. Author of " Spanish Conquest in America," " Friends in Council," etc. 

Two vols, in one. 12mo. $2 00 ; half calf, $4.00. 
V. 

J)E SOTO, AND THE CONQUEST OP FLORIDA. By Theo 

dorb Irving. 

12mo. $2.00; half calf $4.00. 

VI. 

THE COURT AND TIMES OF QUEEN ELIZABETH. By 

Lucy Aiken. 

12mo. Cloth extra, $\00 : half calf, extra, $4.00. 

VII. 

JJUME'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. New Edition, complete in 
three volumes. 

Large 12mo. $7.50 ; half calf, $15.50. 

VIII. 

QJBBON'S ROMAN EMPIRE. New edition, complete in three vols. 

Large 12mo. $7.50; half calf, $13.50. 
IX. 

CYCLOPEDIA OF UNIVERSAL BIOGRAPHY. By Parke Godwin 
New Edition, revised and enlarged. 

Large 12mo. Cloth extra, $3.50 ; half calf, $5.00. 
"Thestudentcanhardlydowithout.it. . . Condensing valuable information in the smallest" possi- 
ble space, and forming a library of biography in itself."— Boston Transcript. 

X. 

THE WORLD'S PROGRESS; A Dictionary of Dates. Being a 
chronological and Alphabetical Kecord of all Essential Facts in the Progress of 
Society from the Creation of the World to the Present Time. With a Chart. 

In one large volume (about 1000 pages). Price $3.50 ; half calf, $5.00. 
•»* The most comprehensive book of iti size and price in the language. 



